
Glass ?)'I ^4g\ 
Book 






PRESENTED BY 






'-i^-. 






'^■y^ 



mMB^ 



-'^ 







ii--M#.y)if'.: -■., -■■■ 



:>^^;. ;;;;•■ 
*>Ji^^'^•'v 












LIFE: 



NATURE, VARIETIES, AND PHENOMENA. 



LEO. H. GRINDOJSr, 

LECTURER ON BOTANY AT THE ROYAL SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, MANCHESTRR; 
AUTHOR OP "EMBLEMS," "FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE," ETC. 




FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. 



PHILADELPHIA 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO, 

1866. 






R> 



Oift 
Joljn Meigs 



LC Control Nimbi 



tmp96 026018 



> 




Q 




C^ 






so 


^ 


r 




1 



PREFACE 



The object of this work is two-fold. First, it is proposed to 
give a popular account of the phenomena which indicate the 
presence of that mysterious, sustaining force we denominate Life, 
or Vitality, and of the laws which appear to govern their mani- 
festation ; secondly, wUl be considered those Spiritual, or Emo- 
tional and Intellectual States, which collectively constitute the 
essential history of our temporal lives, rendering existence either 
pleasurable or painful. The inquiry will thus embrace all the 
most interesting and instructive subjects alike of physiology and 
psychology : the constitution and functions of the bodies in which 
we dwell ; the delights which attend the exercise of the intellect 
and the affections ; the glory and loyeliness of the works of God, 
will all come under notice, and receive their fitting meed of illus- 
tration. Especially will the practical value and interest of hfe 
be pointed out ; the unity and fine symmetry of the True, the 
Beautiful, and the Grood ; the poetry of ' ' common things, ' ' and 
the intimate dependence of the whole upon Him in whom " we 
live, and move, and have our being. ' ' Man, as the noblest recipi- 
ent, upon earth, of the divine life, will naturally be the principal 
object of consideration ; not, however, the only one. Seeing 
that he is the Archetype of the entire system of living things, 
the principles of a true doctrine concerning Mm become the 



4 PREFACE. 

principles of Natural History in every one of its departments. 
Animals, plants, even the inorganic world of minerals, will all, 
therefore, be taken account of, in so far as will be needful to the 
general purpose of the volume. To those who care for the illus- 
tration which physical science casts upon the science of mind, 
and upon the truths of Revelation, there will probably be much 
that is both novel and inviting. In fact, it has been sedulously 
aimed to show how intimate and striking is the relation of human 
knowledges, and how grand is the harmony of things natural and 
divine. Some readers may regard the combination of physiology, 
poetry, and theology, so eminently characteristic of these chap- 
ters, as detrimental to their value, since the subjects in question 
are commonly regarded as incongruous. It is sufficient to say, 
in anticipation of such criticism, that one great aim of the entire 
work is to show the essential consanguinity of every form of 
human thought and human feeling. There has been no hesita- 
tion in dealing with some of the most sacred of topics. The 
physical and the spiritual worlds are in such close connection, 
that to attemj^t to treat i^hilosophieally of either of them apart 
from the other, is to divorce what God has joined together. 
Though the authorized teacher of holy things undoubtedly has 
his special office, it is no invasion, therefore, of his prerogative 
to speak ' ' religiously' ' on themes so high and beautiful as the 
attestations of the divine love expressed in nature. Science 
without religion is empty and unvital. True wisdom, finding the 
whole world expressive of Grod, calls upon us to walk at all times 
and in all places, in the worship and reverent contemj)lation of 
Him. Wishful at all times to speak modestly, and upon sacred 
matters always most reverently, if a single sentence in the 
volume can be shown not to be in accordance with, or can be 
proved contrary to a right and true interpretation of Scripture, 



PKEPACB. 5 

it is here, once for all, acknowledged false, and declared un- 
spoken. 

The views which are set forth lay few claims to originality. 
They are such as have been held by select thinkers in every age, 
though perhaps never before expressed connectedly, or in similar 
terms. Not that the book is a mere compilation of time-worn 
facts. Several of the chapters, such as those upon Rejuve- 
nescence, and the Prefigurations of Nature, deal with subjects 
hitherto scarcely touched. Neither are the views here offered 
final, or binding on a single reader ; they are offered as opinions 
and convictions rather than as dogmas. Certainly, most part of 
the work is written affirmatively, but this must be taken only as 
indicating earnestness of conviction ; anything like dogmatizing 
is altogether disclaimed. They are views which have brought 
inexpressible happiness to the writer ; and they are offered in 
the hope that, while they may render the strange mystery of life 
less perplexing, they will help to render others happy likewise. 

That the book is in many respects greatly deficient, no one can 
become more sensible than the author is. It would be remark- 
able were it otherwise, when the vast extent of the subject is 
considered, and the impossibility of compressing it into moderate 
limits. Ordinarilj', those subjects have been preferred for con- 
sideration which are least commonly attended to. Some may 
seem to call for more lengthy treatment than they receive ; but 
they are designedly curtailed, because already discussed in extenso 
by authors of repute. Such are Sleep, and the Brain. The 
incompleteness of the remarks upon others is compensated in the 
author's separate writings. A large number of quotations will 
be found, ample reference being made to the authorities in all 
the more important of them, and the remainder acknowledged 
in the usual manner. The reader who is acquainted with the 
1 * 



6 PREFACE. 

authors cited will not regret to meet old friends ; and to the 
younger student, they may be valuable as pointing to new sources 
of information. Inserted, as a considerable portion of them 
have been, purely from memory, exercised over a long and diver- 
sified course of reading, it has been impossible always to authen- 
ticate minutely. For the benefit of the younger reader, copious 
references to the literature of the subject are also introduced ; 
the book forming, in this respect, a kind of index. 

Appended will be found an appropriate adjunct to the subject 
of Life, in the shape of a little essay on " Times and Seasons." 



CO^TEi^TS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

General idea of Life, and universality of its presence — Latent life — %■> 
Value of the doctrine sought to be established 11 

CHAPTER IL 

The Source of life, and the rationale of life — The essence of life un- 
discoverable — Laws of Nature 26 

CHAPTER III. 

The varieties of life — Organic life — The vital stimuli — Correlation of 
forces 38 

CHAPTER IV. 

Food — Molecular death and renewal of the body — Specialities of food 
— Hunger the source of moral order — Hunger and love the world's 
two great ministers 57 

CHAPTER V. 

The Atmosphere in its relation to life — Respiration — The Heart and 
the Lungs — Respiration of plants — Trees in grave-yards 77 

CHAPTER VL 

Motion the universal Sign of life — ^Motion in plants — Motion needful 
to Beauty — The Sea and the Clouds — Repose 100 

CHAPTER VIL 

Death — Causes of physical death — The Blood — The nervous system — 
Tenacity of Life — Death of plants Ill 

7 



O CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

PAGE 

The various letises of life — Lease of life in plants — Trees — Death bal- 
anced by reproduction 128 

CHAPTER IX. 

Duration of life in Animals — -Leases of the Mammalia; of Birds; of 
Fishes and Reptiles; of Insects — Lease of Human Life 162 

CHAPTER X. 

Grounds of the various lease of life — Spiritual basis of nature — The 
material world representative only — ^Materialism and Spiritualism.. 175 

CHAPTER XI. 

Grounds of the various lease of life, continued — Correspondence of 
Nature and Mind — -Leases of extinct animals and plants — The Pre- 
Adamite world — Geology and Psj'chology 194 

CHAPTER XIL 

The spiritual expression of life — Nature and Seat of the Soul — The 
Soul a spiritual body 207 

CHAPTER XIIL 

Soul, Spirit, Ghost — Meaning of these words — Philosophy of Lan- 
guage — Anima and Animus — Psyche and Pneuma — Summary 227 

CHAPTER XIV. 

True idea of Youth and Age — Age no matter of Birth-days — The In- 
tellect in advanced life — Life is Love 249 

CHAPTER XV. 

The affections in relation to life — Love of Nature — Poetry of Com- 
mon things — The Imagination — Natural History and the Pulpit — 
Town versus Country 264 

CHAPTER XVI. 

The Intellectual faculties in relation to Life — True idea of Education 
—Reading— The Friendship of Books 280 



CONTENTS. 9 

CHAPTER XVII. 

PAaE 

The Religious Element of Life — True idea of Religious Sects — 
Worldly pleasures and Religion 298 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

Life realized by Activity — Action the law of Happiness — Ennui — 
Art of Conversation — Play 311 

CHAPTER XIX. 

Death in relation to the spiritual life — -Scriptural meanings of Death. 333 

CHAPTER XX. 

Rejuvenescence — Death an operation of Life — Sleep — Spring — The 
Poem of Geology — Flowering plants and Humanity — New doc- 
trines and old 314 

CHAPTER XXL 

Health and Disease^ — The miracle of Healing — -Rationale of mira- 
cles—Unity of Truth 366 

CHAPTER XXIL 

Mortality and Immortality — Life to be made the most of — Sorrow for 
the Dead — -Why is man immortal? — Doctrine of the immortality of 
brutes 386 

CHAPTER XXIIL 

The Resurrection and the Future Life — -True and false emblems of 
Death— Dreams— The Spiritual World 406 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
The Analogies of Nature— Law of Prefiguration 425 

CHAPTER XXV. 

The Chain of Nature — Continuous and Discrete Degrees — Law of 
Promotion 447 



10 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

PAGE 

The Unity of Nature — Homology — True principles of Classification of 
organized beings 470 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

Man the Epitome of Nature — Three Kingdoms of the Human Body 
• — Three Degrees of Human Life 497 

CHAPTER XXVIII, 

Instinct and Reason — Instinct co-ordinate with Life — Specialties of 
Instinct 509 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

Instinct and Reason, continued — Instinct in Man — Reason and Intelli- 
gence 521 

CHAPTER XXX. 
Summary — Inspiration — Life epitomized in Genius 535 



TIMES AND SEASONS 545 



LIFE. 



CHAPTER I. 

GBNERAL IDEA OF IjIFE, AND TTNIVERSAIjITT OF ITS 
FMESENCE. 

1. Life is the loftiest subject of philosophy. There is no 
place where life is not present; and there never was a time 
when life was not. In the great composite fact of a Crea- 
tor are involved the elemental facts of Omnipresence and 
Eternity of existence; and these, in turn, involve Infinite 
Creative Activity, which is the production and sustentation 
of arenas of ever-renovated life. To suppose the Creator 
ever to have been inactive or unproducing, would be to sup- 
pose him inconsistent with himself. Doubtless every one of 
the innumerable orbs of the universe had a beginning, — 
some, probably, were created long subsequently to others, 
and are comparatively in their childhood; but a period 
when there were no worlds, — no terraqueous scenes of the 
bestowal of the Divine Love, the mind is incapable of con- 
ceiving. Ancient as our own world is, there were " morning 
stars" which "sang together" at its nativity. That such 
scenes of life do really exist, certainly we neither know, nor 
is it probable that it lies within the power of man scien- 
tifically to determine; but the affirmative is congenial alike 
to reason, philosophy, and enlarged ideas of God. Truth 
in such matters is determined by balancing probabilities, 
rather than by rigid, mathematical demonstration. If the 

11 



12 PROPER MEANING OF THE TERM LIFE. 

former proposition be admissible, namely, that an inactive, 
unproducing Creator is a contradiction in terms, the "plu- 
rality of worlds" is a corollary almost inevitable. "Life 
was not made for matter, but matter for life. In whatever 
spot we see it, whether at our feet, or in the planet, or in the 
remotest star, we may be sure that life is there, — life physical 
to enjoy its beauties — life moral to worship its maker — life 
intellectual to proclaim his wisdom and his power." Doubt- 
less, too, every shape of organized existence had its own 
special era of commencement, as illustrated in the sequen- 
tialism of the fossils beneath our feet;* but those very fossils 
show at the same moment, that organic life is contempora- 
neous with the consolidation of the worlds which it embel- 
lishes, and thus with the dayspring of Time. The very 
purpose of a world's creation is that it shall be at once 
clothed and made beautiful with life. "For thus saith the 
Lord that created the heavens, — God himself that formed 
the earth and made it; He hath established it; He created 
it not in vain; He formed it to be inhabited." 

2. Under the term Life, however, rightly regarded, is 
comprehended far more than it is ordinarily used to denote. 
We err, if when thinking of the habitations of life we 
associate it only with ourselves, animals, and plants. Life, 
in its proper, generic sense, is the name of the sustaining 



* The non-geological reader may be apprised that the petrified 
remains of animals and plants, which form so large a portion of col- 
lections of natural curiosities, are not mixed indiscriminately in the 
earth, but always occupy the same relative places, — that is, every 
layer or stratum, or at least every group of strata, has its peculiar 
fossils, showing that there must have been as many distinct creations 
as there are changes in the character of the relics. When plants 
and animals first appeared upon our planet, geology will probably 
never be able to point out, nor even to calculate. Azoic rocks are no 
proof of azoic periods. 



ITS UNIVERSALITY. 13 

principle by which everything out of the Creator subsists, 
whether worlds, metals, minerals, trees, animals, mankind, 
angels, or devils, together with all thought and feeling. 
Nothing is absolutely lifeless, though many things are 
relatively so; and it is simply a conventional restriction of 
the term, which makes life signify no more than the vital 
energy of an organized, material body, or the phenomena in 
which that energy is exhibited. Though in man life be at 
its maximum, it is not to be thought of as concentrated in 
him, nor even in " animated nature," outside of which there 
is as much life as there is inside ; though not the same expres- 
sion of life. "The life which works in your organized 
frame," said Laon, "is but an exalted condition of the 
power which occasions the accretion of particles into this 
crystalline mass. The quickening force of nature through 
every form of being is the same."* "The characteristic," 
observes another quick-sighted writer, " which, manifested in 
a high degree, we call Life, is a characteristic manifested 
only in a lower degree by so-called inanimate objects."f 
Hufeland, Oersted, Humboldt, Coleridge, in his "Theory of 
Life," Arnold Guyot, in "The Earth and Man," and many 
others, express themselves in similar terms, none, however, 
more explicitly than the distinguished Carus: — "The idea 
of Life is co-extensive with Universal Nature. The indi- 
vidual or integrant parts of Nature are the members; uni- 
versal nature is the total and complete organism. .The 
relations of inorganic to organized bodies exist only by 
reason of this; hence, too, the universal connection, the 
combination, the never-ceasing action and re-action of all 
the powers of nature, producing the vast and magnificent 



* "Panthea; or, the Spirit of Nature," by Eobert Hunt, p. 50, 

1849. 

t Herbert Spencer. — Westminster Bevieiv, April, 1852, p. 472. 



14 TESTIMONY OF LANGUAGE. 

whole of the world ; — an action and re-action which would 
be impossible, were not all pervaded by a single principle of 
Life."* Strictly speaking, every atom of the constituent 
matter of our globe is alive. "Inanimate matter," "dead 
matter," often vaguely spoken of, matter waiting for the 
breath of Deity to give it life, exists only in fable. Matter 
is not a hearth existing anteriorly to life, and independently 
of life, and upon which the flame of life is sometime kindled. 
In its very simplest and crudest forms it is a sign that the flame 
is already burning. The language of poetry, or rather of 
the poetic sentiment, — ^the golden key to the essential mean- 
ings of words, and the teacher of their right applications, 
has from ages immemorial shown that life is no mere term 
of physiology ; and Scrij)ture, which is the sum and immortal 
bloom of all poetry, pronounces, in its usages, a divine con- 
firmation. In the force and multiplicity of its figurative 
applications, no word takes precedence of Life, — a fact 
which mere accident or conformity to other men's example 
woiild be quite insufficient to account for; the reason is that 
what we ordinarily call "Life," namely, organic, physiolo- 
gical life, is the exponent and explanatory phase of a prin- 
ciple felt to be omnipresent, manifold in expression, but 
uniform in entity. The j)rofound, unerring percejDtions of 
the harmonies of nature, which were the original archi- 
tects, and are the conservators and trustees of language, 
acknowledged no private property in words; and though 
conventionalism and contraction of view may seek to enslave 
particular terms. Life among the number, ever and ever do 
those perceptions free them from their bonds, and pass them 
on to their rightful inheritances. Hence it is that on the 



* "The Kingdom of Nature: their Life and Affinity," by Dr. C. 
Gr. Carus. Translated from the German, in Taylor's Scientific Me- 
moirs, vol. i., p. 223. 1837. 



LIFE VARIOUSLY MANIFESTED. 15 

lips of the poet; — that is, on the lips of every man who is 
in closer alliance with God, and Truth, and Nature than are 
the multitude; — words which with the vulgus have but one 
solitary, narrowed meaning, are continually found serving 
varied and brilliant purposes, which Taste appreciates and 
relishes delightedly. Strange and unnatural as its phrases 
may sound to the unrefiective mind, figurative language, 
rightly so called, is Nature's high-priest of Truth. " Rightly 
so called," because metaphors and similes founded upon 
mere arbitrary or far-fetched comparisons, though often 
confounded with figurative language, are generally but its 
mockery and caricature. True figurative language is an 
echo of the divine, immortal harmonies of nature, thus their 
faithful expositor, the vestibule of Philosophy, and an epi- 
tome of the highest science of the universe. 

3. When it is popularly said, then, that one thing is ani- 
mate, and another inanimate ; that life is present here, but 
absent there; the simple fact of the matter is that a particu- 
lar manifestation of life is absent or present. Such phrases 
come of confounding Expression, which is variable, with 
Principle, which is uniform. A- particular presentation of 
Jife is contemplated, and thus not only is the principle itself 
misconceived, but everything which does not conform to the 
assumed impersonation of it is pronounced contrary to that 
which in reality has no contraries. Just as with popular 
notions of what constitutes Religion, which it is impossible 
rightly to apprehend and define, so long as it is confounded 
with the forms of faith, and the modes and attitudes of wor- 
ship, by which it is locally sought to be realized. It is a 
mere assumption, for instance, that life is present only where 
there are physical growth, feeding, motion, sensation, repro- 
duction, &c. Life confines itself to no such scanty costume ; 
and as if it would rebuke the penuriousness of a doctrine 
which so limits and degrades it, often forbears from all the 



16 FUNGI AND SPONGES. 

more striking phenomena of the series, in the very depart- 
ments of nature of which they are asserted to be characteris- 
tic ; and expresses itself so slenderly, that science needs all its 
eyes and analogies to discern it. In the fimgi, for example, 
and in the sponge, both of which forms of being, by reason 
of then.' attenuated presentation of life, have been regarded 
in time past as belonging to inoi'ganic nature. Fungi have 
been thought to be the extinguished relics or corpses of the 
beautifiil meteors called " falling stars ;" sponges have been 
deemed mere concretions of the foam of the sea. " There is 
found," says old Gerarde, " upon the rocks neare vnto the 
sea, a certaine matter wrought together of the fome or froth 
of the sea, which we call spunges." It is proper to remark, 
however, that by Aristotle, the father of natural history, the 
animal constitution of sponges was at all events anticipated.* 
So with the beautifiil frondose zoophytes called Sertularia, 
Thuiaria, Plumularia, Flustra, &c.f So late as a century 
ago, the mineralogists disputed the zoological and botanical 
claims to the j)ossession of these beautifril organisms, con- 
tending that they were " formed by the sediment and agglu- 
tination of a submarine, general compost of calcareous and 
argillaceous materials, moulded into the figures of trees and 



* For a long and eminently interesting acconnt of the opinions 
and discoveries of the nature of Sponges, and of their situation and 
rank in the scale of organized heing, see the admirable "History 
of British Sponges and Lithophytes," by the late lamented Dr. 
George Johnson, the Gilbert White of the sea. 

f Though these names may not be familiar, the objects they 
designate are known to all who have interested themselves in the 
curiosities and wonders of the shore. Eesembling sea-weeds in 
their general aspect and configuration, and commonly confounded 
with them, they are, nevertheless, readily distinguishable by their 
senii-crystalline textuffe, and whitish brown color; the prevailing 
colors of true sea-weeds being pink, green, or dark olive. 



THE IDEA OF LIFE A PROGRESSIVE ONE. 17 

mosses by the motion of the waves ; by crystallization (as 
in salts), or by some imagined vegetative 'power in brute 
matter. Ray himself seems not to have made up his mind 
about them, for though in some of his writings he indicates a 
correct apprehension of their nature, in the " Wisdom of 
God manifested in the Works of Creation," he includes them 
among " inanimate, mixed bodies," or " stones, metals, mine- 
rals, and salts." " Some," says he, " have a kind of vegeta- 
tion and resemblance of plants, as Corals, Fori, and Fun- 
gites, which grow upon the rocks like shrubs." The fact is, 
the notions of life and of what lives, as of the whole, genuine, 
truth in any matter, are things essentially of growth, and 
modification for the better. The popular notion of life is 
not a censurable one. It necessarily precedes ; the error be- 
ing to remain in it after it has been shown to be only part 
of a truth. Partial truths everywhere form the beginnings 
of knowledge. In science, in philosophy, in theology, it is 
neither so much nor so often that positively false doctrines are 
held, as defective ones. The difference between the intellec- 
tual conditions of childhood and maturity, and thus between 
their counterparts, the uncultivated and the cultivated mind, 
consists, mainly, in the ability to discriminate between what 
is less true and what is more completely true. Unfortunately, 
we are all of us too prone to rest content with our little 
glimpses, and to deem them the absolute total. Tell the 
dull-witted, uninformed man that the gray, leatherlike fun- 
gus upon the old paling lives as veritably as he himself does, 
and he will laugh at you. To him, eating, drinking, and 
movement from place to place alone indicate life. You 
may get his assent perhaps to the proposition that the beau- 
tiful tree swaying its branches there, is alive ; but to make 
the same demand on behalf of the lichens, is to quench all 
his belief in your sincerity, if not in your sanity. To the 
perception of this higher theorem he must progress, as his 

2® 



18 LIFE DOES NOT IMPLY VOLITION. 

teacher did before him, and as that teacher also himself fur- 
ther progresses, when not shackled by a mistaken deference, 
to the perception of a sustaining life even in inorganic 
things. No estimate of facts in nature can be regarded as 
just, consistent, and complete, which confines itself to a 
fixed circumference, calling everything beyond, barbarian. 
In his sphere, the philosopher who sees life only in organic 
things, is no more advanced than the rustic and the child, 
who allow it only to animals. 

4. It needs very little observation of nature to perceive 
that life does not necessarily imply consciousness or feeling. 
If it did, the whole vegetable creation would be lifeless, to- 
gether with many animal structures of humble kind, as the 
sponge and allied beings, So with the mere circumstances, 
separately taken, of volitional movement, feeding and 
growth. As regards movement, for instance, no observa- 
tion or experiment has rendered it even probable that plants 
ever move volitionally, and the same may be said of the 
humble animal organisms just alluded to. This might be 
presupposed, indeed, from the utter absence from plants and 
the sponge, of consciousness and sensation, seeing that with- 
out these there can be no volition, and therefore no impulse 
to move. The fascinatingly curious examj)les of movement 
furnished in the different kinds of Sensitive-plant,* may 



* There are many kinds of sensitive-plant besides the species 
commonly so called, though nearly all are comprised in the great 
family of plants called Leguminosce. The veritable Mimosa sensitiva 
is a very different thing from the beautiful little Mimosa pudica, the 
species ordinarily known as the sensitive-plant. The other exam- 
ples of sensitiveness occur in different species of Oxalidece, a family 
of which our English wood-sorrel is the type ; and in the extraordi- 
nary plants known as the fly-catchers, comprehended in the family 
of Droseracece, the most remarkable being the North American 
Venus' fly-trap, or Dionoea muscipula. 



PHENOMENA OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 19 

seem to be excejDtional, but the whole of these are referable 
to causes which involve no degree whatever of volition. 
The most curious of all, namely, the play of the leaflets of 
the Moving-plant,* may be compared with such movements 
in the animal body as that of the heart, which is constantly 
pulsating, yet quite independently of the will, and even out 
of its control. Exceptions may also seem to occur in the 
closing and opening of many kinds of flowers, commonly 
called their sleep and their waking ; also in the folding and 
re-expansion of the leaves, and in the advance of the sta- 
mens of certain flowers towards the pistil. For all of these, 
however, there is adequate explanation. Causes exciting 
from without, manifestly elicit the chief part of the respec- 
tive movements ; while others are purely mechanical. 
Nothing is easier to perceive, for instance, than that the 
leap of the stamens of the Kalmia from their niches in the 
corolla, comes of the wider expansion of the floAver, which 
unfixes the anthers, and thus causes the filaments to ex- 
change their constrained curvature for the straightness of 
freedom. f The only other kind of vegetable movement ap- 
parently volitional, is that of the minute aquatics called, 
from the nature of their motion, OsGillcdoria. Carpenter 
compares this to the ciliary movement in animals, which is 



* The Moving-plant, or Desmodium gyrans, is a native of Bengal, 
and one of the family of the Leguminosse above mentioned. Its 
leaves are somewhat like those of the clover, and the leaflets, under 
given circumstances, keep moving up and down. An excellent 
colored drawing of it may be seen in the " Icones Plantarum Kario- 
rum" of Jacquin, vol. iii., tab. 565. Similar movements take place 
in the Desmodium gyroides and D. vespertilionis. 

t For particulars of various plant-movements of this nature, see 
Balfour's "Class-Book of Botany," pp. 492-500; and on the subject 
of plant motion in general, Carpenter's "Principles of General and 
Comparative Physiology," chap. xv. 



20 PHYSIOLOGICAL PHENOMENA. 

SO independent of volition as often to continue after the 
organism itself is dead.* 

5. That the mere act of feeding is not an indispensable 
testimony to the presence of life, is shown in deciduous trees, 
or those which cast their foliage in the autumn, and hyber- 
nate till spring, seeing that without the presence of leaves, 
no true vegetable nutrition can proceed. Insects, while in 
the chrysalis form, exemplify the same thing, as do all kinds 
of hybernating animals. So with the phenomenon of grow- 
ing. That this is not needed in order to betoken life, is illus- 
trated in every egg before it is placed under the hen, and in 
every seed before put into the soil. Contemplating " latent 
life," as the physiologists call it, or that which supports the 
egg and the seed prior to hatching and germination, we dis- 
cover in fact, that behind the scenes there is, if possible, even 
more life than in front. Millions of beings enjoy complete 



''' For descriptions and colored drawings of the Oscillatoria, see the 
"British Fresh-water Algae" of Hassall, (1845), wherein is shown 
reason also for supposing the motion of these plants to have been 
" misunderstood and exaggerated to such an extent as to have sur- 
rounded them with an unnecessary degree of mystery. 

"Ciliary motion" is that of the cilia, in animalcules the principal 
organs of locomotion and of obtaining food ; but best to be under- 
stood, perhaps, from what these organs and their movements are in 
our own bodies. The human cilia are minute, transparent hairs, 
ranging from l-500th to l-5000th of an inch in length, and covering 
various interior surfaces, with which water, or other more or less 
fluid matters are commonly in contact. They abound about the eyes 
and ears, and cover the whole extent of the respiratory mucous tract. 
Their office is to assist in propelling onwards, and usually outwards, 
the fluid matters brought into contact with them ; and they do this 
either by constantly waving backwards and forwards, or by whirling 
round on their bases, so that the extremities describe circles — the 
natural result being a continuous current in a determinate direction. 
The waving and whirling are the " ciliary movement." 



LATENT LIFE VITALITY OF SEEDS. 21 

and active life ; tens of millions lie potentially alive, -crowd- 
ing with intense vitality the very places which to appearance 
seem most empty. When excavations are made in the 
ground, the earth brought to the surface speedily becomes 
covered with plants, the seeds of which, as they could not 
possibly have been conveyed there at the moment, must 
have been lying in the soil, accidentally buried at some re- 
mote period, too deep to be acted upon by the rain and air. 
This is rendered the more indisputable by the curious fact 
that plants of different species from those common in the 
neighborhood, not infrequently spring up among the others. 
Ploughing deeper than usual will occasion similar resurrec- 
tions, and the same when the surface soil of old gardens is 
pared off. Often has there shone a lovely and unexpected 
renewal of choice blossoms on removing the turf under the 
walls of old, gray castles and abbeys, which for ages, ivy 
and the faithful wall-flower alone have solaced.* The water 
contains similar stores, holding in suspension myriads of 
germs of algse, ready to grow as soon as they meet with a 



* For remarkable instances of the tenacity of life in seeds, espe- 
cially when buried, see Jesse's " Gleanings in Natural History," vol. 
i., p. 138, and ii., p. 135 ; Hooker's " Companion to the Botanical 
Magazine," vol. ii., p. 293 ; Loudon's " Magazine of Natural His- 
tory," iii. 418 ; viii. 393 ; x. 447, &c. 

The well-known story of the grains of wheat taken from the hand 
of the Egyptian mummy, germinating after thirty centuries' capti- 
vity, though doubted by many, Schleiden at least is a believer in. 
" How long," says he, " the vital power may slumber in the seed, is 
shown by the fact that the late Count Von Sternberg raised healthy 
plants of wheat from grains which were found in a mummy case 
(which, therefore, must have reposed for three thousand years), and 
laid them before the Assembly of Naturalists at Freyburg. This 
experiment has also been made in England." (" The Plant," p. 71.) 
Eggs have been found in a perfect state no less than three hundred 
years old. See " Gardeners' Chronicle," August 20th, 1853, p. 54. 



22 INVISIBLE FLOATING SEEDS. 

suitable resting-place. " Before we have kept our Aquarium 
a fortnight," says Mr. Gosse, "its transparent sides begin to 
be dimmed, and a green scurf is seen covering them from 
the bottom to the water's surface. Examined with a lens, 
we find this substance to be composed of myriads of tiny 
plants, some consisting of a single row of cells of a light 
green hue, forming miaute threads which increase in length 
at their extremity, and become Confervas; while others dis- 
play small, irregularly puckered leaves of deeper green, and 
develope into Ulvse and Enteromorphse." Even the atmos- 
phere is charged with seeds — those miaute bodies produced 
in such amazing numbers by the aerial cryptogamia, and 
which indicate their presence, like the algae in the water, the 
instant that cii'cumstances enable them to vegetate. Where- 
ever vegetable mildew makes its appearance, it is owing to 
the germination of these invisible floating seeds, the vital 
energy of which, lying ia abeyance only till a fitting sphere 
of acting shall be offered, is one of the most wonderful things 
in nature. The genera most largely represented are Penicil- 
lium, Oidium, Chsetomium, Sporodyce, &c.* Not only do 
the seeds of these and other microscopic fungi, along with 
those of mosses and lichens, thus float in the atmosiDhere, 
waiting their opportunity to grow ; there can be little doubt 
that associated with them are myriads of germs of animaU 
cules, especially Rotifera, which find a suitable nidus in 
water containing organic matter in a state of decomposition, 
one kind following another, according to the stage to which 
the decomposition has proceeded, but which remain inactive 
unto, such a nidxis is afforded. It is not improbable that the 
glittering motes seen in the sunbeam when it shines through 
a small aperture into a dark room, consist in part, of these 



* Mildew does not always consist of minute vegetable growth. 
Sometimes, perhaps usually, in woven fabrics, it is referable to an 
action purely chemical. 



LIFE OP THE WOELD. 23 

otherwise imperceptible eggs and seeds. Light, we well 
know, is the great and universal Revelator. Give light 
enough, and it is impossible to imagine what might not 
brighten into human view. The difficulty in microscopies 
is not so much in obtaining lenses of increased magnifying 
power, as in obtaining an adequate amount of light. It 
may be added that as life does not necessarily imply voli- 
tional movement, feeding, sensation, &c., so neither is any 
one of the instruments through which life is manifested, 
universally present. No one instrument in particular can 
be deemed therefore, as essential to life, or as absolutely 
characteristic and indicative of life. 

6. That life does not necessarily imply organization or re- 
production, is shown in what may without impropriety be 
called the Life of the World. Doubtless, there is an impas- 
sable chasm between the mineral and the vegetable, as be- 
tween the vegetable and the annual, and between the animal 
and man. But this inorganic nature, which is represented 
as " dead," because it has not the same life with the animal 
or plant, is it then, to quote Guyot, destitute of all life ? " It 
has all the signs of life, we cannot but confess. Has it not 
motion in the water which streams and murmurs on the sur- 
face of the continents, and which tosses in the waves of the 
sea ? Has it not sympathies and antipathies in those myste- 
rious elective affinities of the molecules of matter which 
chemistry investigates ? Has it not the powerful attractions 
of bodies to each other which govern the motions of the 
stars scattered in the immensity of space, and keep them in 
an admirable harmony ? Do we not see, and always with a 
secret astonishment, the magnetic needle agitated at the 
approach of a particle of iron, and leaping under the fire 
of the !N^orthern Light? Place any material body whatever 
by the side of another, do they not immediately enter into re- 
lations of interchange, of molecular attraction, of electricity, 



24 LIFE OF THE SOUL. 

of magnetism ? In the inorganic part of matter, as in the 
organic all is acting, all is promoting change, all is itself 
undergoing transformation. And thus, though this life of 
the globe, this physiology of our planet, is not the life of the 
tree or the bird, is it not also a life? Assuredly it is. We 
cannot refuse so to call those lively actions and reactions, 
that perpetual play of the forces of matter, of which we are 
every day the witnesses. The thousand voices of nature 
which make themselves heard around us, and in so many 
ways betoken incessant and prodigious activity, proclaim it 
so loudly that we cannot shut our ears to their language." 
Equally, too, may we recognize life as the central, governing 
force of everything comprehended under the names of Intel- 
lect and Will. The particular phenomena of animal and 
plant life may not be present, but they are replaced by phe- 
nomena no less truly vital. Indeed the life of the soul, or 
that which is played forth as the activity of the intellect 
and the affections, is the highest expression of all. Com- 
pared with this life, the life of animals and plants, and the 
life of the globe, are but mimicries and shadows. 

7. It is this full, generic significance of the word life, 
which we propose to recognize and illustrate in the following 
pages; physiological life taking its place, not as life abso- 
lutely and exclusively, but as one manifestation among many. 
The doctrine which it involves is no mere hypothesis of the 
fancy. It is dictated by nature ; it commends itself to com- 
mon sense, to do which is the chief glory of all that belongs 
to uncomvuon sense ; it is eminently practical ; it is promo- 
tive, in fact, of the highest aims of science and philosophy, 
metaphysical no less than physical. Here is the great cer- 
tificate of its soundness. For while the ultimate characte- 
ristic and test of every true doctrine concerning nature is 
that no phenomenon in the universe is absolutely beyond 
the range of its powers of interpretation, the immediate and 



VALUE OF OTJK DOCTRINE OF LIFE. 25 

proximate test lies lq its capacity to illuminate every path of 
human inquiry, whithersoever it may lead. Such a doctrine 
has not only a local value and application, but is, directly 
or indirectly, a clue to the whole mystery of creation. Other 
doctrines may help more largely in particular provinces, but 
no doctrine is so generally efficacious as this grand and com- 
prehensive one of the omnipresence and the unity of life. 
"Life it is which gives to the universe all its reality as well as 
splendor, so that the larger our conception of life, the more 
nearly do we approach both to a just appreciation of the 
magnificence of nature, and to the solution of her stupen- 
dous problems. Not the least of the advantages accessary 
to the doctrine here set forth, is that the physiologist who 
adopts it, instead of entering on his inquiries with the sense of 
a great, unnatural gap between physiology and physics, finds 
the latter not only adjoined, but an instructive introduction. 
He ascends, as all rational philosophy advises, from the sim- 
ple to the complex. Coleridge clearly exhibits this in his 
"Theory of Life," above cited; Dr. Eadclifie well exemplifies 
it in his "Proteus, or the Law of Nature." "As an earnest," 
he observes, " of the rich harvest which is to come when the 
current separation of physiology from physics shall be for- 
gotten, several phenomena which were once deemed peculiar 
to living bodies are now explained by ordinary physical in- 
fluences." Looked at through a single science, Life is unin- 
telligible ; for the sciences, separately taken, are but like the 
constituent portions of a telescope, we can only see properly 
by connecting them. Physiology, for the same reason, be- 
comes a pathway and preface to psychology, which inquired 
into witliout reference to physiology, as its material represen- 
tative, is but an intellectual ignis fatuus. Every true law 
in metaphysics has a law corresponding to it in physical 
nature, and the latter is often the surest clue whereby to 
find it. 

3 B 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SOZTMCJE OF IjIFE, AND THE MATIONAI^E OF ZIFE. 

8. Life is no part of God's works, no created and there- 
fore finite substance; neither is it in any case detached from 
him, or independent of him. As the rivers move along 
their courses only as they are renewed from perennial 
springs, welling up where no eye can reach, so is it with 
life. Genuine philosophy knows of no life in the universe 
but what is momentarily sustained by connection with its 
source, with Him who " alone hath life in himself" The 
popular notion, which sees an image of it rather in the 
reservoir of water, filled in the first place from the spring, 
but afterwards cut ofi", and holding an independent exist- 
ence, is countenanced neither by science nor revelation. 
How can independent vitality pertain even to the most 
insignificant of created forms, when it is said so expressly 
that " in Him all things live, and move, and have their 
being?" Even man has no life of his own, though of 
nothing are people more fiilly persuaded than that they live 
by virtue of an inborn vital energy, to maintain which, it 
needs only that they shall feed and sleej). Not that men 
deny the general proposition that life is from God, and in 
the hands of God. Every one is willing to allow that he 
received his life originally from the Almighty, and that the 
Almighty takes it away from him when he pleases. Few, 
however, are willing to regard themselves as existing only 
by virtue of his constant influx, which, nevertheless, is the 

26 



THE ESSENCE OF LIFE UNDISCOVERABLE. 27 

only way in which it can be true that " in Him we live, and 
move, and have our being," It is wounding to self-love, 
and to the pride of human nature, to think of ourselves as 
so wholly and minutely dependent as we are, moment by 
moment, day and night, the senses all the while insinuating 
the reverse. Moreover, in the minds of most men there iu 
a strong aversion to recognize physical effects as resulting 
from spiritual causes. Towards everything, indeed, which 
involves a spiritual element — which lifts us above the region 
of the senses, there is a deep-seated dislike, such as mere 
argument is perhaps incapable of overcoming, and which 
can only give way, it would seem, under the influence of 
higher moral feelings. Truly to understand anything of 
God's government and providence, we must first of all be 
faithful to his revealed law. We can form no right esti- 
mate, either of nature or of life, till we strive, with his 
divine blessing, to become in ourselves more truly human. 

9. Uncreate and infinite, it follows that of the precise 
nature of this grand, all-sustaining principle, this Life as 
we call it, man must be content to remain forever unin- 
formed. Man can obtain knowledge only of finite and 
created things. No philosophy will ever be able to explain 
life, seeing that to " explain" is to consider a phenomenon 
in the clearness of a superior light, and that life is itself 
and already the highest light. However it may be mani- 
fested, to man life can never be anything hut life. This is 
no misfortune ; perhaps it is an advantage. It is impossible 
to become either good or wise unless we can make ourselves 
contented to remain ignorant of many things ; and the 
grander the knowledges we must learn cheerfully to forego, 
the more useful is the discipline. As there is " a time to 
get and a time to lose," so is there a time to seek and a time 
to refrain from seeking. The hypothesis of a "vital force," 
by which some have sought to account for life, does no more 



28 NATURAL LAWS. 

than push the difficulty a little further back, since the ques- 
tion immediately arises, What is the "vital force," and 
whence derived ? Whether we contemplate it in inorganic 
nature, or in organic, and by whatever name we may choose 
to designate it, force is nowhere innate, nor is it originally 
produced or producible by any combinations or conditions 
of matter, visible or invisible. Everywhere in the consider- 
ation of force, we are told of a power within and underlying 
that which we are contemplating. Nowhere do we find the 
power itself, but only the continent of the power ; perhaps 
merely the sensible effect by which its presence is indicated. 
No force, in a word, in the whole range of material nature, 
is initial. The utmost point to which science can convey us, 
even when dealing with the most occult and recondite phe- 
nomena — those of electricity for example — ^never shows 
where force begins. There is always a still anterior force, 
which cannot be found except by the light of Theology. In 
philosophy, as in trouble and in death, willing or unwilling, 
we must go to God at last. 

10. Others refer life to the "laws of nature." This, 
within certain limits, is perfectly proper. Life, in all its 
varied phases and manifestations, does come, most assuredly, 
of the " laws of nature." The error is to remain in the laws 
of nature, and deem that life comes of these only. Laws 
of nature, in themselves, have no more efficacy than "vital 
force," and have as little independent existence. "In all 
ages of the world," says Hitchcock, "where men have been 
enlightened enough to reason upon the causes of phenomena, 
a mysterious and a mighty power has been imputed to the 
laws of nature. A large portion of the most enlightened 
men have felt as if these laws not only explain, but possess 
an inherent power to continue, the ordinary operations of 
nature. But what is a natural law without the presence 
and energizing power of the l&Mgiver f Who can show how 



GOD ALONE IS LIFE. 29 

a law operates except through, the influence of the lawgiver? 
How unphilosophical, then, to separate a law of nature from 
the Deity, and to imagine him to have withdrawn from his 
works ! To do this would be to annihilate the law. He 
must be present every moment, and direct every movement 
of the universe, as really as the mind of man must be in 
his body in order to produce movement there. The law 
hyiDothesis supposes law capable of doing what only Infinite 
wisdom and power can do. And what is this but ascribing 
infinite perfection to law, and making a Deity of' the laws 
which he ordains?"* Law of itself could not cause or 
maintain the existence of a single thing, though it was ac- 
cording to law all things were created, and though it is by 
the same primitive, immutable laws, that all phenomena, 
both material and spiritual, are effectuated. It is the life 
underlying the law which causes and sustains. The law is 
merely the mode of the putting forth of that life ; the rule 
of its action ; the definite method in which the internal, Di- 
vine, dynamic principle is projected. Nature has no inde- 
pendent activity, no causality of its own. God is the only 
independent existence, and he is the cause of all causes. 
He alone hath life in himself. Proximately, the universe, 
and all that it contains, is Zai<;-governed : but it is at the 
same time fundamentally and essentially (xodf-governed. 
Animals and plants, in their vital processes, the external 
world and all its changes, alike declare a Divine beginning. 
God it is who displays the manifold lovely phenomena which 
render the earth, the air, the sea, and their vicissitudes, 
pictures so vivid of human experience. The tossing of the 
white-crested waves; the gliding of the clouds before the 
wind ; the daily illumination, and the morning and evening 
painting of the sky ; the glitter of the stars ; the rainbow, 



* Beligion of Geology. Lecture ix. 
3* 



30 THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF MATTER. 

these, and all other such things, come of the watchful and 
benevolent activity of our living Father in the heavens, who 
is never a mere spectator, much less an indifferent one, either 
in terrestrial or in spiritual things ; still are they in no case 
exercises of mere lawless fiat. 

11. The very existence of the earth as a planetary mass 
depends, but in a proximate sense, on the " laws of nature." 
The same is true of the various materials which compose it ; 
water, for example, formed under the influence of the natural 
law which science calls " chemical affinity." Let the affinity 
be annulled, — in other words, let the Divine life cease to act 
upon the constituent oxygen and hydrogen, no longer im- 
pelling them to combine, — and every drop would instantly 
decompose and disappear. Under a similar withdrawal 
of sustaining energy, every solid and fluid of nature, even 
the solids we call simple and primitive, would depart; 
massive and impregnable as it seems, the whole of this great 
globe would dissolve into thin air and vanish. For just as 
water is resolvable into oxygen and hydrogen, so are these 
latter, along with the solid elements, the metals, phosphorus, 
iodine, &c., resolvable into yet finer elements, into which, 
unless supported by the Divine life, they would similarly 
decompose. The actually primitive elements of our earth, 
instead of fifty-five or fifty-six, are probably only two._ The 
tendency, without doubt, if we look only at one department 
of chemical inquiry, seems of late to have been towards an 
increase of the number rather than to a diminution; the 
profounder investigations of natural philosophers dispose 
them, however, more strongly every day, to refer back the 
whole to a simple flagrant or inflammable body, and a pure 
conflagrant body, or suj)porter of fire; in other words, to an 
active substance and a passive. The analysis of one will 
lead to the reduction of all the rest, and establish the true 
principia whereby the science of chemistry will be consum- 



RELATION OF THE WORLD TO GOD. 31 

mated. Science, be it remembered, has never made a single 
step except in the wake of imagination ; the practical ideas 
of one age have all been begotten of the impractical of a 
former; the morning star of all philosophy is poetry. Gold, 
silver, oxygen, &c., probably come each one of them of a 
special play of affinity between the molecules of the two 
primitives, having a corollary in the resulting products of 
absolute and relative, ductility, elasticity, &c., such as causes 
gold to be where we find gold, silver where we find silver, as 
accurately and inevitably as the affinities which take place 
between the atoms of gold, silver, oxygen, &c., give origin, 
in turn, to oxides, acids, earths, alkalies. Whether there be 
any yet earlier conditions of matter than these two can only 
be reasoned upon from analogy. It is not within the ability 
of man to compass with actual knowledge either the inaxi- 
mum naturoe or the minwium. 

12. Though the Divine, by means of his life, be thus the 
basis of all nature, even its minutest atom, we are not to 
confound him with nature; — this would be even worse than 
the ascription of everything to "Law." Superfluous as it 
may seem after the distinct references that have been made, 
it is well, perhaps, that upon this great and sacred point we 
should have, before going any further, a full and explicit 
understanding. The ancients described the world as a huge 
animal, vitalized by an impersonal (poy^/] xoaixoo, or anima 
mundi. Even in modern times we have seen it taught that^- 

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body nature is, and God the soul." 

Commonly termed " Pantheism," this is, properly speaking, 
Athemn. Pantheism, rightly so called, is the doctrine which 
sinks nature in God. "This was the pantheism of the 
famous Spinoza, which some people have been so foolish as to 
call atheism. Spinoza was so absorbed in the idea of God, that 



32 GOD AND NATUEE DISTINCT. 

he could see nothing else." Pantheism is the most unreason- 
able of doctrines ; atheism the most mean and gross. God 
is God, and nature is nature. Intimately connected with 
each other, yet are they absolutely distinct. Nature is an 
utterance of the divine mind, clothed in material configura- 
tions and phenomena, — flowing from it as words from the 
underlying thought, or the deeds of friendship from its sen- 
timent; God himself reigns apart from it, in the heayens, 
No true conception of nature can be attained, any more 
than a true doctrine of the grounds and uses of religion, 
till this great truth of the separateness, and therefore the 
personality of God, be acknowledged and felt. For even to 
think only of wisdom, power, omnipresence, &c., is not to 
think of God; it is but to think of a mere catalogue of 
abstractions; the terms are meaningless till impersonated, 
till we connect them, in short, with Him who said, — "He 
who hath seen me hath seen the Father," — "the man Christ 
Jesus, who is over all, God blessed forever." It is the im- 
mediate consciousness of a supreme and eternal unity, as 
Carus finely remarks, which enables us to distinguish the 
just, the true, and the beautiful ; so that demonstrations of 
true science exist, in fact, only for those who set out with 
the idea of God in Christ as the beginning; studying nature 
from him rather than towards him. It is good to "look 
from Nature up to Nature's God," but it is better and best 
to look at nature from its framer and sustainer. There 
would be no falling into pantheism, no forgetting the Creator 
in the creature, were this always made the starting-point in 
the survey. The humanity of Christ is the true beginning 
of all wisdom and philosophy, no less than the immediate 
avenue to redemption. Not that the idea of God can be 
entertained irrespectively of nature; each idea is needful to 
the apprehension of the other. "He," says Franz Von 
Baader, "who seeks in nature, nature only, and not reason; 



CREATION FOREVER IN PROGRESS. 33 



-<^ 



he who seeks in the latter, reason only, and not God ; and *;,-'^~«^e^ 
he who seeks reason out of or apart from God, or God out ^" J 
of or apart from reason, will find neither nature, reason, nor y 
God, but will assuredly lose them all three." .'- , " 

13. In the "laws of nature," accordingly, we have not w ' 
" blind, unintellectual fatalities," but expresjions of Divine , f 

^ yolitions, They appear to us independent and sufficient, ' 

because God never discloses himself directly — only through „ - 
some medium. The world is full of apparent truths; they 3i ~ 
enter largely into our very commonest experiences; a stick 
immersed in water appears to be broken ; the banks of a ' ; 
river seem to move as we sail past ; the coast seems to re- 
cede from the departing ship ; a burning coal swung quickly 
round seems a ring of fire. So with the "laws of nature." - 
To the eye of the senses they are one thing ; to the eye of ^ ^ 
true philosophy quite another. Seeming to accomplish all, -2, ; 
in reality they accomplish nothing. Oersted never wrote a ' ' 
finer truth than that " the conception of the universe is in- 
complete, if not comprehended as a constant and continuous 
work of the eternally-creating Spirit;" nor Emerson, in re- 
lation to the same fact, that " it takes as much life to eon- 
serve as to create." Because of these great verities is it that 
to study the laws of nature is in reality to study the modes " - ■ •^^ 
of God's action ; that science is simply " a history of the 
Divine operations in matter and mind ;" that the world, 
with all its antiquity, is every moment a new creation, the 
song of the morning stars unsuspended and unsuspendable 
to the ear that will listen for it, a virgin to every fresh 
wooer of the Beautiful and the True. ■^' ■ 

14. How close does it bring the Creator to us thus to re- r ■'■- ^ 
gard him not so much as having made the world, as still ]^"j i^^ 
engaged in making it; i. e., by supplying the life on which "* ^^ 
its laws, and thus its being and incidents, depend. It is an W ej 
ill-constructed theology which regards God as having created -C^ 

B » 



34 LIFE BEGHNS IN ACTION AND REACTION. 

only in past ages. A gorgeous sunset, the leafing of a tree 
in the sweet spring-time, betokens the Divine hand no less ^^ 
palpably than did the miracles which provided the hungry . 
multitudes of Galilee with food. "Depend upon it," says 
an eloquent preacher, " depend upon it, it is not the want ^ 
of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are 
allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into 
the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that where- , ^ 
ever God's hand is, there is miracle, and it is simply an un- 
devoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can 
there be the real hand of God. The customs of heaven .„- 
ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomal ies.; Ci 
the dear old ways of which the Almighty is never tired, than 
the strange things which he does not love well enough to re- 
peat. He who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises 
any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may 
recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam 
gazed on the first dawn in Paradise; and if we cannot 
find him there, if we cannot find him on the margin of the 
sea, or in the flowers by the way-side, I do not think we 
should have discovered him any more on the grass of Geth- 
semane or Olivet." 

15. Uncreate and infinite, it follows, in addition to conse- 
quences specified, that Life as to its essence is no subject for 
scientific consideration. All that science can do is to investi- 
gate the circumstances under which it is manifested, and the 
efiects which it produces. Carefully studying these, and 
along with them, the processes of life, we may learn, how- 
ever, the rationale of its action, next to the nature of life, 
the grandest fact in its philosophy, and the centre and foun- 
dation of all true and great ideas of life ; therefore a benign 
and animating compensation. Narrowly looked at, under- 
lying every phenomenon of the material world, and under- 
lying every psychological occurrence, there is found a fixed, 



UNIVERSAL DUALISM OF NATURE. 35 

causative relation of Two tilings, or Two principles, as the 
case may be, different and unequal, yet of such a difference, 
and such an inequality, that like man and woman, who con- 
stitute the type and interpretation of the whole of nature, 
both visible and invisible, each is the complement of the 
other ; one being gifted with energy to act, the other with 
equal energy and aptitude to 7'eact. All phenomena, alike 
of matter and of mind, resolve into this dual virtm. Whether 
physical or spiritual, animal or vegetable, Life always pre- 
sents itself as communicated through this one simple for- 
mula, the reciprocal action and reaction of complementaries. 
Where there are greatest variety and complexity of action, 
and reaction, all the results converging at the same time, to 
one great end, as in plants, animals, and man, the presenta- 
tions are the grandest ; where there is least of such variety, 
and no such immediate reference, as in the phenomena of 
inorganic chemistry, there the presentations are the himiblest. 
The great cosmic phenomena induced by Gravitation, Elec- 
tricity, &c., comprising everything studied by the astronomer, 
the meteorologist, and the electrician, form no exception. 
Binary causes lie at the base of all. The sun and moon 
cast their light upon us ; the rain falls and the waves roll ; 
the spheres preserve their rotundity, and persevere in their 
motions, all as the result of underlying dual forces. The 
Fabric of nature, like its phenomena, resolves, everywhere, 
into dualities. Land and water, • male and female, the 
straight line and the curve, do but express prominently, a 
universal principle. The Elements, we have already seen, 
are almost demonstrably, only Two. 

16. The ground of this Avonderful, all-pervading dualism, 
and concurrent action and reaction, producing the magnifi- 
cent results we call Nature and Life, lies in the very nature 
of God himself, who is not so much the ingenious deviser 
and designer, displaying in the world the contrivances of 



3b PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING THIS DUALISM. 

Skill, as its Archetype and Exemplar. That is to say, the 
world is what we find it, not so much because he willed it to 
be so, arbitrarily, as because of his containing, in his own 
nature, the first principles of its whole fabric and economy. 
It pictures in finites, what he is in infinites. Infinite Wis- 
dom and Infinite Goodness, or Love, as we have seen in 
another place,* are shown both by natu.ral and revealed 
theology, to be the all-comprehending essentials of the Di- 
vine ; omnipotence, omniscience, justice, mercy, and every 
other attribute, inhering in, and manifesting and fulfilling 
these two. In these two principles all things have their be- 
ginning ; in all things therefore are they embodied and re- 
presented. Wherever there is life, the Divine Wisdom and 
Goodness are consentaneously and fundamentally declared. 
In one we may fancy the Divine Art shows most conspicu- 
ous, in another the Divine Power ; but the true seeing finds 
these no more than outer circles, enclosing Love and Wis- 
dom as the inmost. In that admirable adaptation and 
aptitude of things to act and react, and thus to enter into a 
relation of which marriage is the highest exponent, consists, 
accordingly, the whole principle of living action. There is 
no other source of phenomena, either in the animated or the 
inanimate world, and wherever it brings things and natures 
into contact, reciprocally adapted each to the other, life im- 
mediately appears, beautiful and exuberant. God made 
things complementary on purpose that they should unite, 
and open channels wherein his life should have new outlet ; 
until conjoined, and they have opened such new channels, 
they are everywhere restless and erratic; everywhere in 
earth and heaven, equilibrium comes of well assorted mar- 
riage, or union of complementaries, and there is no equili- 



* "Sexuality of Nature," wherein the whole subject of the dualities 
and reciprocal principles of nature is exhibited and illustrated. 



LIFE EEPEBSENTBD IN MAREIAGE. 37 

brium independent of it. Nothing, moreover, so surely 
brings disorder and unbappiness, as interference with natu- 
ral affinities, and neglecting to be guided by them. Using 
the word in the high and holy sense which alone properly 
attaches to it, i. e., as signifying the conjunction of princi- 
ples and ajffections, and only ia a secondary and derivative 
sense, the conjunction of persons — the union of the proto- 
typal, all-creative Wisdom and Goodness in the Divine, is 
itself a marriage ; so that Life might not inappropriately be 
described as the playing forth of the principle of which cor- 
poreal marriage is the last effect. The development of a 
new living creature, that is, of a new incarnation of life, 
when there is externalized love between man and woman 
(who in matrimony rightfully so called, constitute the finite 
picture and counterpart of the Almighty), is the very sym- 
bol and emblem of the develojDment of life. What the 
babe is to its parents, such is life, as to its presentation in 
phenomena, to the action and reaction of the two things or 
two natures underlying it. 
4 



CHAPTER III. 



TUB VARIETIES OF JOIFE— OUGANIC IjIFE — TBE " VITA.T1 
STIMVLI." 

17. Peimaeily, the manifestation of life is twofold, phy- 
sical and spiritual. Physical life is life as expressed in the 
constituents of the material or external world, giving exist- 
ence to whatever is cognizable by the senses. Spiritual life 
is that which gives vitality to the soul; underlying thought 
and feeling, animating the intellect and the affections, and 
sustaining all that is contained in the invisible, non-material, 
or spiritual world. Spiritual life, so far as it is allowed the 
finite mind to perceive, is expressed in only one mode: Phy- 
sical life is expressed in two modes, namely, as observable, 
(1) in the inorganic half of the material creation ; (2) in the 
organic half. The latter, which may be called Organic or 
Physiological life, presents the further distinction of life as 
it is in animals, (including the material body, or animal 
half of man;) and life as it is in vegetables. Put into a 
tabular form, the several distinctions may be apprehended 
at a glance: — 

A. Inorganic. 



The expression 
of Life is : — 



38 



'1. Physical 
or 
Natural. 



[2. Spiritual 
or 
Psychological 



B. Organic 
or 
Physiological 



a. Vegetable. 

b. Animal. 



LIFE COMMENSURATE "WITH USE. 39 

Inorganic life is the lowest expression ; Vegetable succeeds ; 
Animal life comes next; and highest is the Spiritual. Won- 
derful and truly miraculous is it that a single and purely 
simple element should be presented under such diverse 
aspects, the extremes far apart as earth and heaven, though 
it is not without some striking illustrative imagery in objec- 
tive nature, where the same substance is occasionally found 
under widely dissimilar forms, as happens with charcoal 
and the diamond, both which consist essentially of carbon. 
There is a grand and beautifal law, however, in the light 
of which the whole matter becomes intelligible; namely, 
that the communication of life from God is always in the 
exact ratio of the Use and Destiny of the recipient object in 
the general economy of Creation, The more princely the 
heritage of office, always the more beautiful and complex is 
the Form of the object, and commensurately with this, the 
more exalted is the presentation, and the more noble the 
operation, of the life which fills it. This is the great funda- 
mental principle to which are referable all diversity of 
structure and configuration in nature, all dissimilitude of 
substance and organization, and all variety in the force and 
amount of Life. It may be illustrated by the operation, 
under its various opportunities, of water, which in compo- 
sition and inherent capabilities, is everywhere precisely the 
same. In connection with machinery, which is like the 
complicated and elaborate structure of organized bodies, we 
see it either turning the huge mill-wheel by the river; or 
heated into steam, making a thousand wheels whirl in con- 
cert; and in either case promoting mightiest ends and uses. 
Away from machinery, and merely gliding as a stream 
towards the sea, it serves but to carry onwards the boat that 
may be launched upon it. Lying as a still lake, among the 
unpeopled and silent mountains, its energy seems depressed 
into inertia, though at any moment that energy is capable 



40 INORaANIC LIFE. 

of being played forth, in all its astounding plenitude, give it 
but the adequate medium. So with the Divine life in the 
universe. In the words of a powerful writer, " The material 
world, with its objects sublimely great or meanly little, as 
we judge them; its atoms of dust, its orbs of fire; the rock 
that stands by the sea-shore, the water that wears it away; 
the worm, a birth of yesterday, which we trample under 
foot; the streets of constellations that gleam perennial over- 
head ; the aspiring palm-tree fixed to one spot, and the lions 
that are sent out free ; these incarnate and make visible all 
of God their natures will admit," that is, all of his Life 
they are competent to receive and play forth, by virtue of 
their respective ofiices in the system of the world, and the 
forms they hold in harmony therewith. Carbon in the 
shape of diamond has a nobler destiny than carbon in the 
shape of charcoal; therefore it receives that intenser com- 
munication of life which is so exquisitely phenomenonized 
in crystallization, and the concurrent translucency and 
brightness. The soul has a nobler destiny than the body; 
therefore has it the imperial life whereby it travels whither 
it will, piercing space to its utmost bound, centrifugal as 
light. 

18. Inorganic life, the first-named of these three great 
varieties or manifestations of the vitalizing principle, has 
been illustrated in the preceding chapters. It will suffice to 
add here, that it has nothing in common with organic or 
physiological life, much less with the spiritual ; nothing, that 
is to say, except the Divine origin and sustentation. The 
recipient forms occupy a plane of their own, in every sense 
subordinate and distinct, and the phenomena which they 
exhibit bear not the slightest similarity to those manifested 
upon the superior planes, as regards any strict and essential 
resemblance. The generalization by which it is associated 
with the higher varieties, proposes to view it as that particu- 



THE ORGANIC EXPRESSION OF LIFE. 41 

lar expression of the universal Divine energy whereby inani- 
mate things "have their being," just as under another ex- 
pression, animate things have theirs, and nothing more. The 
second variety, the Okgakic or Physiological expression of 
Life, — that which vitalizes plants and animals, and the ma- 
terial body of man, — is so called because of the playing 
forth of its phenomena through the medium of special in- 
struments or organs, as in animals, the limbs, the heart, the 
brain, &c., and in plants, the leaves, the flowers, the stamens, 
&c. Mineral substances, though they sometimes possess a 
very beautiful configuration, and even a kind of internal 
arrangement of parts, as seen in agates, never possess dis- 
tinct organic members. These pertain peculiarly to plants 
and animals, the sole subjects and recipients of organic life. 
Taking the word in its literal and most general sense, the 
phenomena of the Spiritual life are organic, being played 
forth like those of physiological life, through special instru- 
ments ; the very same instruments in fact. It is legitimate, 
nevertheless, to restrict the name to physiological life and 
phenomena, seeing that the latter take precedence of the 
spiritual, both in extent and diffusion, and in order of mani- 
festation. The race of beings alone recipient of spiritual 
life constitutes (as regards earth) the least part of living 
nature, and every member of it is animal before human. 
The Organic is the expression of life which, as the prime 
instrument of all man's temporal enjoyments, has in every age 
allured his intensest interest. Its facts and mysteries have com- 
mended themselves to his intellect as the peerage of science 
and philosophy, the alpha and the omega of all natural 
knowledge. If, says Aristotle, the knowledge of things be- 
coming and honorable be deservedly held in high estima- 
tion ; and if there be any species of knowledge more exqui- 
site than another, either upon account of its accuracy, or of 
the objects to which it relates being more excellent or won- 

4« 



42 DEFINITIONS OF LIFE. 

derftil ; we should not hesitate to pronounce the history of the 
animating principle as justly entitled to hold the first rank.* 
With all enthusiasm and assiduity accordingly, have chemis- 
try, anatomy, and physiology, toiled at the splendid theme. 
Theories innumerable have been devised with a view to its 
elucidation; all however, in vain, because framed in the 
sunless chambers of an exclusively secular philosophy. 
Esteemed by some the cause of organization, by others its 
consequence; imagined at different periods to be fire,"!" light, 
oxygen,! electricity, § and galvanism, "still the exulting 
Eureka has not been uttered, either in the laboratory, the 
dissecting-room, or the schools of the savmu. The enigma 
has continued to baffle all the propounders of solutions; — 
the heart of nature's mystery has not been plucked out, 
even by the most vigorous of the wisest of her sons." Pur- 
sued as a matter of purely scientific inquiry, researches into 



* TMv KoXCiv Koi Ttfilcov K. T. X., TTEpt ipi'X'?sj Book i., chap. 1, the open- 
ing sentence. 

t Among those who held this very ancient doctrine was Hippo- 
crates. He considered heat not only the foundation of life, but as 
the Divinity itself, intelligent and immortal. — AokUi it fioi b KoXtofiEvov 

Ocpfiov dOdvarov tc sivai, Kai voeiv jiavra, k, r. \. Works, SeC. iii., p. 249. 

Foesius' Edit., 1621. Eelics of this belief survive in the phrases 
vital spark, the flame of life, &c. See for curious illustrations, 
Bishop Berkeley's Siris, sections 152 to 214. 

X As by Girtanner, Journal de Physique, &c., tome 37, p. 139. 
See also Bostock's Elementary System of Physiology, vol. 1, p. 209, 
1824. 

§ This has been a very favorite hypothesis, and still meets with 
approval. Abernethy, for one, regarded electricity "not merely as 
the prime agent in sensation, but as even constituting the essence of 
life itself." See his " Inquiry, &c., into Hunter's Theory of Life," 
pp. 26, 30, 35, 80, &c., 1814. It is singular to find this intelligent 
writer sliding into materialism at the very time when he is directing 
the force of his genius against it. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANIZED BEINGS. 43 

the mystery of life cannot possibly have any other termina- 
tion, seeing that to follow such a course is to attend merely 
to Effects, and to entirely disregard and disown the Cause. 
Look at the results of the countless strivings to contrive a 
descriptive name for the wily Proteus ; — vital principle, vis 
vitce, vital spirit, impetum faciens, spirit of animation, organic 
force, organic agent, vis 2ii(istica, materia vitce diffusa, &c., 
&c. ; — what do they amount to beyond a tacit confession of 
total inability? Look at the attempts, scarcely fewer, that 
have been made at a definition of life. If they have not 
been mere substitutions of many words for one, adding 
nothing to our previous knowledge, they have been similarly 
fruitless exercises in a few. When Bichat, for instance, 
opens his celebrated " Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie 
et la Mort," by defining life as "the sum of the functions 
by which death is resisted,"* what is it, as Coleridge well 
asks, but a circuitous way of saying that life consists in being 
able to live? As little to the purpose is Dr. Fletcher, when 
he says that "Life consists in the sum of the characteristic 
actions of organized beings, jDerformed in virtue of a speci- 
fic susceptibility, acted upon by specific stimuli;" or Bich- 
exand, when he tells us that "Life consists in the aggregate 
of those phenomena which manifest themselves ia succession 
for a limited time in organized beings." Neither of them 
explains anything. Even the attempt, last in point of time, 
and from the lesson of others' errors, presumable to be best 



* "ia vie est V ensemble des fonctions qui resistent d la mort." See 
the remarks on this much criticized sentence in the edition of Bichat 
by Cerise. Nouvelle Mition, Paris, 1852, p. 274. Auguste Compte, 
a mere bookman in such subjects, devotes a long argument in his 
Philosophie Positive (tome 3, p. 288,) to what he calls, with most 
amusing complacency, the pvfonde irrationalite of his great country- 
man. 



44 DEFINITIONS OF LIFE. 

in execution, — ^that of Herbert Spencer, who devotes the 
whole of the third part of his masterly Elements of Psycho- 
logy to the consideration of the subject, bringing up by 
careful and steady steps to the conclusion that "the broadest 
and most complete definition of life will be the continuous 
adjustment of internal relations to external relations," — even 
this deals but, like the others, with the phenomena of life. 
It is no "definition," — merely a statement of certain signs 
of life. If we are to understand by the word " Life" simply 
the attestations of its presence, — the signs, and nothing 
more, — these several authors have done as well, perhaps, as 
the subject permits. But in that case we are left precisely 
where we were. Life itself, the thing attested, has yet to be 
defined, and requires a distinct and superior name. Some 
" definitions" have been couched in a single word, " Assimi- 
lation" for example. But as in the preceding cases, what is 
assimilation more than a circumstance of life? Were assimi- 
lation life itself, we should know all about the latter so soon 
as we had noted the assimilating process, by means of a 
little chemistry, in the green duckweed of the standing pool. 
In no way is it more paramount than reproduction is. As 
well might Life be defined to be Death, seeing that death is 
the universal end. 

19. In the phenomena just adverted to, namely, the As- 
similation of food internally, and Eeproduction of the 
species in direct descent ; followed after a given period of 
activity, by Death, consist the grand characteristics of Or- 
ganized beings. However plants and animals may differ 
among themselves, this threefold history pertains to every 
species without exception. Functions, accordingly, even 
more decidedly than organs, distinguish the members of the 
Vegetable and Animal kingdoms from the Mineral. It is 
important to observe this, because in many of the humbler 
kinds of animals and plants, organs strictly so called, are 



VITAL TISSUE. 45 

not developed. In the Protococcus or red-snow plant, the 
whole apparatus of life is concentrated into the compass of 
a single microscopic cell. Assimilation and Reproduction 
are performed there nevertheless, proving that separate and 
complex organs are non-essential to them. It follows that 
the absolute, unexceptionable diagnosis of organized bodies 
consists not so much in the possession of distinct organs, as 
in the presence of vital tissue ; that is to say, cells filled with 
fluid, at all events in their younger stages, and possessing, 
every one of them, full powers of assimilation and repro- 
duction ; so that although no more than a single cell may 
be developed, it is still, to all intents and purposes, an or- 
ganized body. This latter condition is what we witness in 
the red-snow plant. The body of man is a vast mountain 
of cells of precisely the same intrinsic character as those of 
the Protococcus, only built into special members, and endued 
with a- more powerful vitality. Whether members be de- 
veloped or not, "vital tissue" is the basis of the entire 
organic world, as markedly as it is absent from the mineral, 
and forms the sedes ipsissimce of the whole of the vital pro- 
cesses. That they are destitute of vital tissue is the reason, 
accordingly, why minerals perform no functions. Wanting 
its sensibility and expansiveness, the stone, the metal, the 
crystal, once formed, lie forever afterwards in perfect still- 
ness, until assailed, that is, by new chemical agencies from 
without, tending to decompose them. No alterations take 
place within their substance ; they neither feed, nor breathe, 
nor procreate ; their once active life has subsided into simple, 
stationary existence. With the organized body it is exactly 
the reverse. During the whole period of its tenure of life, 
it presents, more or less evidently, the phenomena of growth, 
and of change of form and substance, many of the most 
important changes recurring in definite cycles of succession. 
Things, in a word, which are recipient only of the inorganic 



46 ANIMAL AND VEGETATIVE FUNCTIONS. 

degree of life, are marked by but one phenomenon — that of 
the accretion of their particles into the mass ; those which 
receive the organic degree, present an assemblage of phe- 
nomena, and these are both simultaneous and continuous. 
The active life of the mineral ceases as soon as the mineral 
is formed ; that of the organized body goes on unabatedly, 
and is even more vigorous after the completion of the form 
proper to it, than before. The diamond ceases from active 
life as soon as it becomes a diamond; whereas the corre- 
sponding period in the history of an animal is precisely that 
of its highest energy commencing. 

20. Animals contrasted with plants show distinctions 
equally sharj), though in many points these two great classes 
of beings are most intimately allied. In the former, the 
organs, and therefore the functions are more numerous and 
varied, and all those now appearing for the first time, have 
peculiarly noble offices. Such are the eye and the ear, with 
their respective powers of sight and hearing. The latter 
kind are distinguished by physiologists as the "Animal" 
functions; those which are common, to both classes of 
beings, are called the "Vegetative."* In man, for example, 
the Vegetative functions are feeding, digestion, respiration, 
&c., (all of which he has in common with the plant), their 
central organ being the heart, or rather the heart and lungs 
cooperatively ; while the animal functions are those which 
depend upon the brain. In animals, the organs of the 
Vegetative functions are generally single, as the heart, the 
stomach, and the liver ; those, on the other hand, of the 



* Some authors call the Vegetative functions the "Organic." The 
former is by far the better name, being definite and strict in its 
application, whereas "Organic" properly denotes both classes of 
functions. The latter is the sense invariably intended in the present 
volume. 



ANIMAL AND VEGETATIVE FUNCTIONS. 47 

Animal functions, are for the most part arranged in pairs ; 
that is, they are double and correspondent, as in the two 
eyes and two ears ; or they have two symmetrical halves, 
parallel with the mesian Itue of the body, as in the nose, the 
spinal marrow, and the tongue. The functions of the Vege- 
tative organs continue uninterruptedly; the blood, for in- 
stance, is in continual circulation; those of the Animal 
organs are subject to interruptions. Still it is everywhere 
the same life, essentially, which is played forth. The higher 
and lower presentations come wholly of the peculiar offices, 
and thence of the capability of the recipient organism to 
disclose it. The lowest degree of expression is in the sim- 
plest forms of vegetables, such as the microscopic fangi, 
known as moulds and mildew ; the highest is in the material 
body of man. Between these are innumerable intermediate 
degrees, all referable, however, either to vegetable, or to 
animal life. In the Vegetable, by reason of its less noble 
destiny, the operation of life is seen merely in the produc- 
tion of a determinate frame-work of roots, stems, leaves, 
and flowers, and the maintenance of these in a state of self- 
nutritive and reproductive activity. In the Animal, it pro- 
duces analogues of all the organs that the vegetable pos- 
sesses, after a more elaborate mode, and superadds to them, 
Nervous matter. This gives sensation, and the power of 
voluntary motion, and introduces the creature into social 
communication with the objects around it, such as to the 
vegetable is utterly unknown. We shall see, further on, 
how such widely parted extremes are yet consistent with 
singleness of idea ; also, in considering Discrete degrees and 
the Chain of Nature, how along with the most beautiful 
serial progression and development, there is absolute separa- 
tion and distinctiveness, both as regards species, and the 
great aggregates we call the Kingdoms of nature. 

21. To the support of Organic life are needed Food, Air, 



48 FOOD, AIR, AND THE VITAL STIMULI. 

and the great dynamic substance or substances known as 
Heat, Light, and Electricity.* The latter are what authors 
call the "vital stimuli," their operation, either singly or 
combined, having long been recognized as the first essential 
to the manifestation of vital phenomena. Properly speak- 
ing, the whole suite should be iacluded under the name of 
Pood, seeing that they equally contribute to the stability of 
the organism. They are not merely stimuli, or excitants of 
vital action ; definite quantities of them must be introduced 
into the organism, of which they are the mponderable ali- 
ment, as food commonly so called, is the ponderable. This 
is strikingly exemplified in the history of the Cerealia, or 
Corn-plants, to which a long summer or a short one makes 
no difference, provided they receive the same aggregate 
amount of heat and light. Every one knows that if the 
supply of natural, wholesome aliment be reduced below a 
certain level, there is alike in plants and animals emaciation 
and loss of vigor ; and that if totally deprived of food, they 
speedily starve to death. Debarred from regular supplies 
of Air, Light, Electricity, &c., though the supply of food 
may be adequate, plants no less than animals, suffer as 
severely as in the former case. Respiration, the circulation 
of the blood, the flow of the sap, digestion, assimilation, all 
stand in need of their united and complementary service. 
Equally and as absolutely essential is it to the very genesis 
of the organism, whether we take the child in the womb of 
its mother, or its counterpart, the embryo seed in the pistil 
of the flower, excepting, in the former case, the immediate 
presence and operation of atmospheric air. We shall first 



* To this list will perhaps have to be added odyle, tlie extraordi- 
nary agent to which attention is invited by Eeichenbach. See his 
Kesearches on Magnetism, Electricity, &c., translated by Dr. 
Gregory, 1850. 



INFLUENCE OF LIGHT UPON PLANTS. 49 

consider the "Vital Stimuli ;" secondly, Food ; and thirdly, 
the Atmosphere, in relation to life. This will prepare us to 
understand the proximate causes and nature of Death; 
which will lead in turn to the consideration of the great 
compensating laws of Eenewal, and to the curious mysteries 
of the diversity in the leases or specific terms of life. 

22. The most striking illustrations of the importance of 
Light to the play of life are furnished by the Vegetable 
kingdom. Secluded from the solar light, plants, if they do 
not soon die, become wan, feeble, and sickly. What few 
leaves and shoots may be painfully put forth, are pale-yellow 
instead of green ; and the ordinarily firm and solid stem be- 
comes watery and semi-transparent. If there be an effort 
made to produce flowers and seeds, that is, to become parents, 
after self-j)reservation, the foremost, though it may be un- 
conscious, desire of all living things, it is but to fail miserably. 
The qualities of a plant are no lessweakened by want of light 
than its constitution is. The acrid become bland, the dele- 
terious innocuous. In gardens and orchards, flowers and 
fruits accidentally shaded by dense foliage, fail to acquire 
their proper tint ; while of the flill sunlight come all the glow 
and brilliance of the blossom, the purple hue of the peach, 
the rosy one of the apple. Who has not observed the long- 
ing and beautiful affection with which plants kept in par- 
lors turn themselves towards the window; and how the 
large, broad leaves of the geranium will even press their 
bosoms to the glass ? The sunflower, the heliotrope,* the 



* The delicious, vanilla-scented, lilac flower, which now bears the 
name of Heliotrope is in no way specially deserving of it. Neither 
is the great golden Sunflower of our autumn gardens, which is so 
called, not, as often thought, because of remarkable sensitiveness to 
solar attraction, but because of its vast circular disk and yellow 
rays. 

6 C 



50 INFLUENCE OF LIGHT UPON PLANTS. 

turnsole, the salsafy, are celebrated for keeping their faces 
always fixed on " glorious Apollo." It would be much more 
difficult to find a plant which does not turn towards the sun, 
though its movement might be slower than is fabled. While 
these confess the sweetness and the potency of the solar pre- 
sence, that sullen troglodyte, the Lathrcea squamaria, or tooth- 
wort, of our woods, where the botanist obtains it only by 
excavating among earth and dead leaves, shows in its ske- 
leton-like configuration and cadaverous hue, that life in the 
dark is but a compromise with death. When the trees and 
shrubs, beneath the shade of which it usually secretes itself, 
are cut away, so as to expose the plant to the full action of 
the light, like a morose and unsocial man made to laugh 
against his will, it enlivens into a beautiful pink purple. 
Superabundance of light, on the other hand, elicits the most 
beautiful displays, both as to perfection of form, and height 
of color. Tschudi, in his picturesque " Sketches of Nature 
in the Alps," tells us that the flowers there have a wonder- 
fully vivid coloring. " The most brilliant blues and reds, 
with a rich brown, shading to black, are observable amidst 
the white and yellow flowers of the lower districts, both 
kinds assuming in the higher regions a yet more pure and 
dazzling hue." A similar richness of coloring is reported 
of the vegetation of Polar countries, where the hues not only 
become more fiery, but undergo a complete alteration under 
the influence of the constant summer light and the rays of 
the midnight sun, white and violet being often deepened into 
glowing purple. This happens not alone with the flowers. 
Withui the arctic circle, the lichens and mosses shine in hues 
of gold and purple quite unknown to them in lower latitudes. 
The balsamic fragrance of the Alpine plants, likewise caused 
by the brilliant light, is, according to Tschudi, no less remark- 
able and characteristic. From the auricula down to the violet- 



INFLUENCE OF LIGHT UPON ANIMALS. 51 

scented moss (Bissics colithes), this strong aromatic property 
is widely prevalent, and far more so in the high Alps than 
in the lowlands. The strict physiological reason of the ill 
development of plants when deprived of the proper amount 
of light, at least of all green plants, is that plant-life, as re- 
gards personal nutrition, is spent in the decomposition of 
carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, from the proceeds of 
which are manufactured the tissues and their contents ; such 
decomposition bearing a constant ratio, cceteris paribus, to 
the amount of light enjoyed. To certain kinds of sea-weeds, 
it is proper to remark, light seems, by a curious exception, 
to be unfriendly and distasteful. This is the case with many 
of the Rhodospermese, as Delesseria sanguinea, D. ruscifolia, 
and Rhodomenia laciniata, which instead of growing in the 
open parts of the sea-coast, select obscure hollows, shadowed 
by overhanging cliffs, and in such dark spots alone attain 
their highest beauty. Some of this tribe will not grow at 
all in shallow water, or where there is a full stream of solar 
light ; and such as can bear to be so placed, usually show 
the incongeniality of their location by degeneracy of form, 
and loss of brilliancy of tint. Delesseria sanguinea, made 
mock of in a glass vase, speedilv loses its lovely crimson, 
and becomes a mere white membrane. Fondness of seclu- 
sion from the full sunlight is remarkable also in many ferns. 
Under the shade of trees, or upon sheltered hedgebanks, 
they alone reach their maximum of luxuriance. 

23. The value and importance of light to Animal life, 
though the immediate connection is not so obvious, all expe- 
rience shows it impossible to over-estimate. There is some- 
thing more than a metaphor in speaking of the " light of 
life." Light, in poetic language, is life. When Iphigenia 
in Euripides is reconciling herself to the death so happily 
averted, she exclaims, X'^cpe ftoi, (fdov fdoQ, " Farewell, 



52 IMPORTANCE OF LIGHT TO HUMAN HEALTH. 

beloved Light!"* Digestion, assimilation, circulation, the 
functions also of the brain and of the nerves, proceed in a 
more orderly and agreeable manner when we exclude our- 
selves as little as possible from the light of heaven. No 
dwellings are so pleasant, because so healthful, as those 
which have a southerly aspect : people who live in houses 
looking chiefly to the North and East, suffer seriously, if not 
sensibly, from the imperfect sunning of the air ; the unkind- 
liness of the aspect imparts itself to the occupants ; that the 
heart should look southwards, our windows should do so. 
No one can say how much sickness and debility, how much 
ill-temper and moroseness are not owing to self-imprisonment 
in dark streets, and dull counting-houses, and back parlors, 
into which a sunbeam never enters: "Truly the light is 
sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the 
sun." School-rooms, most of all, should be on the sunny 
side of the house ; no sensible school-master ever places them 
anywhere else. The curious exception to love of light which 
occurs in the pink sea-weeds, again occurs in marine Animal 
life. Almost all the animals which inhabit the sea-side are 
more numerous under the shelter of rocks than where the 
coast is open. Compared with such localities, shadowless 
sands and beaches are untenanted. The colours also of 
marine animals, like those of the algse, are often brighter 
when they dwell in comparative shade, as well exemplified 
in the prawn. It is only in the gloom of deep holes and 
rocky pools that the fine zebra-like hues of this pretty crea- 
ture become fully developed. Fishes, especially those of 
the sea, are well known to be fonder of night than of day, 
probably because of darkness being more congenial ; and 



* Iphigenia in Aulis, 1519. See in reference to the passage. The 
Hieroglyphica of Pierins Valerian us, p. 490, de Lucema; and vari- 
ous citations from the Latin poets in Alciati's Emblemata, p. 720. 



AGENCY OF HEAT. 53 

the same is probably the reason of many animals being most 
active in the winter. Here again we have a parallel with 
the vegetable world ; it is when the days are darkest and 
shortest that the Christmas-rose expands its flowers. Sun- 
shine has a wonderful influence even upon external form, as 
we might anticipate indeed from the improvement it causes 
in plants. Humboldt ascribes the frequency of deformity 
among certain nations who clothe but scantily, more to the 
free action of light upon their bodies, than to any peculia- 
rities in mode of life. Those exquisite shapes which Art 
has immortalized in marble, doubtless owed not a little to 
the full and free exposure of the body to the light and air, 
so agreeable in the fine climate of ancient Greece. 

24. We may but read of what Light does for life, but we 
feel what is the agency of Heat. Reduce the supply of 
heat, and development is checked. Remove it wholly, and 
the organism, whether animal or vegetable, (except in some 
few very low forms,) is frozen to death. Hence the instinct- 
ive avoidance of the impending evil by the tender, migratory 
birds and animals; and the behaviour and condition during 
winter of the hybernating species. It is principally through 
lack of heat that the frigid zones are nearly bare of vegeta- 
tion; and that through the increase of temperature, as the 
equator is approached, the eye is delighted at every step, by 
a richer luxuriance. "To the natives of the north," says 
Humboldt, "many vegetable forms, including more espe- 
cially the most beautifiil productions of the earth, (palms, 
tree-ferns, bananas, arborescent grasses, and delicately- 
branched mimosas,) remain for ever unknown ; for the puny 
plants pent up in our hot-houses, give but a faint idea of 
the majestic vegetation of the tropics." The operation of 
heat in the earliest periods of organic existence, is alone 
sufficient to indicate how important this agent is to life. In 
tlie incubation of birds, the warmth communicated by the 

5 » 



54 AGENCY OF ELECTRICITY. 

parent to the egg, during her long and patient fidelity to her 
nest, elicits that response on the part of the germ, which 
leads on to the hatching of the chick. The seeds of plants 
stand in similar need of the solar warmth in order to germi- 
nate, and acknowledge it as promptly. So, indeed, with the 
gestation of viviparous animals, as woman. The embryo, 
embedded in the womb, amplifies into a fiiUy-formed child, 
not more through the contributions made to its substance by 
the nutrient apparatus provided for the purpose, than 
through the agency of the genial warmth which flows into 
it from all sides, and without which neither limbs nor organs 
could be moulded. 

25. What may be the precise way in which Electricity 
assists in maintaining life, is as yet a profound secret. From 
what has been observed, however, there cannot be a doubt 
that it performs a part fiilly as energetic as either light or 
heat, and this whether we take animals or plants. As re- 
gards the former, its peculiar relation appears to lie with 
"nerve-force." Nerve-force is excitable by electricity, and 
electricity may be produced by the exercise of nerve-force, 
as exemj)lified in those remarkable creatures, the Torpedo 
and the Gymnotus. Our personal sensations, which are an 
unfailing index to the truth in such inquiries, tell us how 
exhilarating is an atmosphere well charged with this magical 
element, and how life languishes when it is deficient or ren- 
dered inoperative. Plants receive a corresponding benefit. 
The evolution of new tissue is greatly accelerated by a plen- 
tifiil supply of the electric fluid, manifesting itself in rapid 
and lively growth. For particulars respecting its agency, 
also concerning the relation of heat, light, and electricity, 
generally, to Organic life, we must refer the reader to trea- 
tises the scope of which allows more room than can be 
afforded here; giving what space remains to a notice of the 
grand discovery, so ably set forth by Mr. Grove, that in- 



DOCTRINE OF THE "CORRELATION OF FORCES." 55 

stead of being three things, Light, Heat, and Electricity are 
only one, variously set forth, and mutually convertible, the 
doctrine in short of the " Correlation of the Physical Forces." 
It is important briefly to consider this doctrine, seeing that 
it provides, in the estimation of some of the most emment 
physiologists of our day, a solution of the great problem of 
organic life. "That Light and Heat," says Carpenter, "be- 
come transformed into Vital Force, is shown by the same 
kind of evidence that we possess of the conversion of Heat 
into Electricity by acting on a certain combination of 
metals ; of Electricity into Magnetism by being passed round 
a bar of iron ; and of Heat and Electricity into motion when 
the self-repulsive action separates the particles from each 
other. For just as Heat, Light, Chemical afiinity, &c., are 
transformed into vital force, so is vital force capable of 
manifesting itself in the production of Light, Heat, Elec- 
tricity, Chemical affinity, or mechanical motion; thus com- 
pleting the proof of that mutual relationship or ' correlation' 
which has been shown to exist among the physical and 
chemical forces themselves."* That without heat and elec- 
tricity, life cannot for one instant be sustained, is indispu- 
table ; and that without them, the changes and phenomena 
which disclose its presence can never occur. Equally true 
is it that (as specially observable in the Cerealia above- 
mentioned) there is a definite relation between the degree of 
vital activity and the amount of heat, light, &c. supplied to 
the organism. Curious and truly wonderflil too is the con- 
cord between these "forces" and the vital energy, as regards 
their restorative powers; the warmth of the hand restores 
the perishing fly, and the voltaic current reanimates the 
half-drowned man. To say, however, that they are trans- 



* "Principles of Human Physiology," p. 123. 1853. See also the 
'Projet d'un Essai sur la Vitalite," of Andral, p. 35. Paris, 1835. 



F 



56 J. J. a. WILKINSON ON CORRELATION. 

formahle into a spiritual essence — for if life be derived from 
God, vital force can be nothing else — seems to savor strongly 
of such a perfect contenteduess with the material as surely 
does not consist with a pure and devout philosophy. The 
dependence of life, proximately, upon physical causes, is not 
questioned; life is no miracle, in the special sense; and it is 
our plain and bounden duty, as investigators of nature, to 
attempt to give to this dependence a clear and definite ex- 
pression. But we are not to talk of "vital force" as if it 
were a thing of merely terrestrial origin, heat and electricity 
sublimed and transmuted. " According to this doctrine of 
correlation"* (^. e., of the physical forces with vital force,) 
observes an author of no common sagacity, "according to 
this doctrine, heat has only to pass through a cell-germ to 
be converted into vitality. This doctrine ends, therefore, in 
fire-worslii2oping ; for it makes the light and heat of the ma- 
terial sun, the fountains of the force of organization; and 
deems that these pass through vegetables, and become vege- 
table life ; through animals, and become animal life ; through 
brains, and become mind, and so forth. Therefore, a fine 
day, poured into its vessel, man, becomes transmogrified 
into virtues ; dark nights are converted into felonies ; dull 
November days into suicides ; and hot suns into love. This 
is materialism with spiritualism in its pocket, There is no 
convertibility of forces between life and nature; there are 
no cells by which heat can be filtered into vitality."f 



* On tlie general subject of the Correlation of Forces see Mr. 
Grove's admirable work bearing that title, and an excellent article 
on the "Phasis of Force" in the National Review for April, 1857. 

f " The Human Body, and its connection with Man," by J. J. 
Garth Wilkinson, p. 389. 1851. 



CHAPTER IV. 

FOOD. 

26. Wherever provided with instruments of action, life 
requires for its maintenance unbroken supplies of food. No 
organized being can dispense with food altogether, though 
some, from peculiarity of constitution — as reptiles, the car- 
nivorous mammalia, certain hybernating creatures, and 
trees — can fast for surprisingly long periods. Plants feed 
in order that they may enlarge their fabric, and renew, pe- 
riodically, their foliage and blossoms ; animals feed because 
the exercise of their various organs is attended by decompo- 
sition of their very substance, which consequently needs to 
be repaired to the same extent. While the lungs, the heart, 
the liver, the muscles, the nerves, perform faithfully the se- 
veral duties assigned to or demanded of them, it is at the 
expense of the material they are composed of; and were the 
loss not speedily compensated, life would soon be necessi- 
tated to depart, as it actually does in cases of starvation. 
For life, in animals, is not merely living — it consists not 
alone in the activity and vigorous exercise of the bodily or- 
gans. In order to its energetic playing forth, there is 
needed a nice balance and alternation of death and renewal 
in every tissue concerned in the vital processes ; and only 
where exchange of new for old is regularly and actively go- 
ing on, can life be truly said to reign. We cannot live, in 
a word, as to our total organism, unless we are always dy- 
ing as to our atoms ; nor is there an instant in which death 

C * 57 



58 MOLECULAR DEATH AND RENEWAL OF THE BODY. 

is not somewhere taking place. Every effort and every 
movement kills some portion of the muscles employed ; 
every thought, even, involves the death of some particle of 
the brain. As fast as devitalized, the atoms are cast out — 
some through the lungs, others through the skin, &c. ; every 
pore and passage of the body supplying means of exit. So 
general and incessant is the decomposition, and along with 
it the rebuilding, that a few weeks probably suffice for the 
dissolving and reconstruction of the entire structure; cer- 
tainly it does not occupy many years. In the course of a 
life-time, " every individual wears out many suits of bodies, 
as he does many suits of clothes ; the successive structures 
which we occupy bear the same name, and exhibit the same 
external aspect; but our frames of to-day are no more iden- 
tical with the frames of our early youth than with those of 
our progenitors." In this wonderful flux and replacement 
of the atoms of the body, quite as much, consists its admira- 
ble adaptation to the purposes of life as in its exquisite me- 
chanism and variety of organs. It is so perfect an instru- 
ment of life, because composed of millions of delicate pieces, 
so slenderly cohering that any one of them can be discarded 
and replaced without difficulty. Hence, in the aged, and 
in the deceased, where the tissues are hardened and conso- 
lidated, where the renewal is slow, difficult, and irregular, 
we see life proportionately feeble ; where, upon the other 
hand, they are soft and delicate, and renewal rapid, it is in 
the same ratio strong and beautiful. Historically viewed, 
the periodical renewal, of the human body at least, is one 
of the most venerable ideas in physiology. Long before 
Cuvier's fine comparison of the human fabric to a whirl- 
pool, and Leibnitz's simile of a river, it had been likened to 
the famous ship of Theseus, which was always ,the same ship, 
though from being so often repaired, not a single piece of 
the original was left. Plato adverts to it both in the Ban- 



PROXIMATE OBJECT OF FOOD. 59 

quet and in the Timseus. Mark, for future use, the grand 
and inevitable sequence that the essentiality of the body is 
certainly not to be looked for in the matter of which it is 
built, but must needs consist in a noble, imponderable, in- 
visible something, which the changing physical frame sim- 
ply closes and overlies. Mark, too, and alike for future 
use, the fine analogy between the death and renewal of the 
constituent elements of the individual human being, and 
the death and renewal of the atoms of the human race. 

27. The use of food, accordingly, is to meet this incessant 
waste. A corresponding and continuous importation of new 
material from without, available for the restoration of the 
several organs, becomes, in consequence of it, rigorously in- 
dispensable. That such new material may be procured, the 
loss of the old is signalled in the vehement longing we call 
hunger : this leads to consumption of it in a crude form ; 
digestion and assimilation then come into play, promptly 
turning what is consumed into blood, or liquid, circulating 
flesh, and by the fixation of this wherever wear and tear 
have been undergone, the process of reparation is completed. 
Incessantly coursing through the body, the blood, as it ar- 
rives at the various parts, gives itself up to the genius loci : 
where muscle is out of repair, muscle is renewed from it ; 
where bone is wanted, bone is renewed ; cartilage, brain, 
nerves, alike suck from this noble fluid their restoration, as 
originally, from the same beautiful and overflowing cornu- 
copia, their birth and substance. The proximate object of 
food is thus to nourish the blood.* It is because the blood 
hungers and thirsts, that we feel impelled to eat and drink ; 



* That the formation of blood is the use of food, appears to have 
been a very early conclusion. "The gods," says Homer, "neither 
eat food nor drink the purple wine, wherefore they are bloodless." — 
Iliad, V. 341. 



60 TWOFOLD USB OF FOOD. 

the hunger of the stomach is only the voice with which it 
clamors. Itself the most wonderful substance in nature — 
for the sake of the blood, everything else in nature subsists. 
Light, heat, and electricity, animals, plants, and miaerals, 
all in some way subsidize and minister to it. Man is man 
only by virtue of his blood, and nature chiefly admirable as 
supplying its ingredients. Wherever in the human body 
there is most blood, there is greatest vital energy, and vice 
versa; and in exact proportion to the decline from the 
standard quantity and quality required in it, is the depar- 
ture from the body of health and vigor. 

28. Besides integrity of substance, a certain degree of 
temperature must be kept up in the body, otherwise the 
muscles would lose their power of contracting, and the 
nerves their power of conveying impressions to and from 
the brain. This is partly provided for by the ingress of 
heat from without, as noticed in the preceding chapter; 
partly by arrangements for the evolution of heat chemically, 
within, — such arrangements, like those for rebuilding, being 
immediately dependent upon supplies of proper food. Hence 
in the raw material of nutrition, along with the substance 
suitable for masonry, must be included substance that shall 
be serviceable as fuel ; and organic chemistry seems to prove 
that it is precisely such material which we instinctively select 
for our diet. Human food, according to the researches of 
Liebig, is always either nitrogenous or carbonaceous, or 
both, — the first element serving to furnish flesh, the second 
the means of warmth ; and it would ftirther appear that it is 
for the sake of procuring these two in sufiicient quantity and 
proportion, that we almost invariably compound our food, 
mixing vegetables with meat, butter with bread. What 
seems to be luxury, is simple instinct, acting through the 
palate. During the period of growth, or in childhood and 
adolescence, an important additional source of demand for 



COMPOSITION OF FOOD. 61 

food is the increase which the various tissues are then under- 
going. The sphere of the activity of the constructive powers 
exceeds the actual dimensions of the body, which extends 
itself, under their impulse, in every direction ; and induces, 
while thus enlarging, a corresponding voraciousness. The 
demand for food during this period is sill further promoted 
by the circumstance of the tissues having not acquired the 
degree of consolidation which they hold in adults, and being 
therefore more readily susceptible of decomposition. Con- 
sidered as a local affection of the body, hunger is referable 
to the nerves of the stomach. No affection is more inti- 
mately connected with the nervous system, or more power- 
fully influenced by nervous states and emotions. Sudden 
grief, anger, and fright, will often remove it instantaneously, 
and even change it into loathing. In plants, it is important 
to observe, there is no decay of the ultimate or elementary 
tissues, such as occurs in animal organisms, and which it is 
the design of the nutritive processes in animals to compen- 
sate. Instead of this, ia the vegetable all is growth, till the 
organ which the growth produces, having fulfilled its destiny, 
ceases to act, and dies bodily. In plants, therefore, there is 
no such thing, strictly speaking, as nutrition, the true idea 
of this process being, as above described, reparation of 
molecular waste. 

29. The form, sources, and composition of the food of the 
two great classes of organized beings, involve varied and 
most interesting considerations. Here it is unnecessary to 
do more than indicate a few leading ideas upon the several 
themes. The composition of food must necessarily always be 
the same as that of the organism which lives upon it, — that 
is, the crude material of food must needs contain ingredients 
convertible respectively into bloOd and sap, and thence into 
flesh, in its various forms, also bones, and in the plant what 
are called the vegetable tissues. If such ingredients be not 





62 FOEM OF FOOD. 

present, the material cannot be called food. It follows that 
those foods will be the most serviceable and nutritious which 
contain in a given bulk the largest proportion of parts capa- 
ble of being easily assimilated into the body of the eater. 
More or less nutritious as it may be, the action of the diges- 
tive organs always separates from our food precisely the 
same elements. Eat what we will, the composition of the 
body does not alter, — explaining the celebrated aphorism of 
Hippocrates, that there is only one food, though there exist 
many forms of food. With all the higher animals, and pro- 
bably throughout the entire range of animal life, it is pre- 
cisely the same, 

30. Next as to the form of food. The more complex the 
structure of the organism, and the higher its powers, the 
more complex must be the aliment on which it lives, and 
also the more varied in its shape. Man needs a more com- 
plex food than the brute races do, and animals in general a 
more complex one than serves for vegetables. Animals, 
again, need both solid and liquid aliment, while vegetables 
take the whole of their food in fluid forms. Although 
thirst is a violent desire, drink, however, appears by no 
means indispensable to animal life; for several kinds of 
creatures, as quails, parrots, and mice, do not drink at all; 
and individuals of our own species have lived in perfect 
health and strength, scarcely ever tasting liquids. The 
Sloth, Waterton tells us, "feeds on leaves, and scarcely ever 
drinks." The doctrine, originally started by Mirbel, that 
animals live upon organic matter only, and vegetables upon 
morganic, and which is often thought to carry with it a valid 
distinction between them, is defective; plants, though they 
absorb the greater part of their nutriment from the atmos- 
phere, and though they take up solutions of many purely 
mineral matters, also consume dead organic substances; the 
difference between their habits in this respect, compared with 



FOOD OF PLANTS. 63 

the custom of animals, being that the latter eat those sub- 
stances in the bulk, while plants need that they shall first be 
disintegrated and dissolved, — ^that they shall have already un- 
dergone, in fact, the very process which it is the first ofiice 
of the animal stomach to eflfect. Parasites, such as the 
mistletoe and Orobanche, so far from feeding on purely in- 
organic substances, or even on dead or decomposing matter, 
subsist on the living, circulating juices of the trees and 
plants on which they fix themselves. An exacter distinction 
is that animals destroy what is actually in possession of life, 
in order that they may support themselves; while plants, 
with rare exceptions, are innocent of such deeds. The ex- 
ceptions occur in the singular plants called fly-catchers; 
botanically Drosera, and Dioncea, inhabitants of bogs and 
morasses, the former abundantly in England. Their leaves 
are so constructed as to entrap midges and other little flies ; 
the juices of whose bodies, or the gases yielded by their 
decay, appear salutary and agreeable to them. Thus it is, 
however, that everything in the world gets eaten sometime; 
the ceaseless activity of nature is conversion of what is lower 
into what is higher, — " above the lowest nature each thing is 
eaten and eater, end and beginning in succession." 

31. The particular diet, both of animals and of plants, is 
a subject of inexhaustible interest. That of plants is the 
leading idea of the new science of "Agricultural Chemistry." 
Doubtless, the mechanical character of the soil has its influ- 
ence; but it can hardly be from this circumstance alone 
that we find the golden cistus, the vervain, and many deli- 
cate grasses in perfection only when their roots can shoot in 
calcareous earth ; that some plants thrive best on sandstone, 
others upon clay; and that the sea-shore alone is found 
possessed of the salsola, the sea-convolvulus, and the lovely 
but formidable Eryngo, the blue touch-me-not of the- sand 
hills. Wheat and other cereals require silex; the oak is 



64 FOOD OP ANIMALS, 

reputed to love a soil with iron in it. Generally speaking, 
however, there is a great uniformity in the tastes of plants, 
as proved by their intermixture in the fields. Taking one 
with another, two substances alone seem to sufiice them — 
water and carbonic acid. Widely different is it with ani- 
mals. Here almost every species has an especial liking, 
though all tastes may be classed under some few general 
heads. Gregarious animals live mostly upon the fruits of 
the earth ; solitary ones upon the flesh of other animals. 
Among the latter, or the carnivora, there are feeders on fish, 
flesh, and fowl respectively; among the herbivorous, some 
feed on leaves, some on roots, some pick out the seeds, others 
take the whole plant, the bees love only the honey. This 
various choice, together with the selection of difierent species 
of plants and animals by certain creatures, and the rejection 
of others, allows of all finding a plentiful supply of what is 
salutary, and this without interfering with the wants of 
others. Linnaeus tells us, that after a careful course of trials 
with the domesticated animals, and about five hundred 
species of the ordinary plants of the fields, the horse Avas 
found to eat two hundred and sixty-two, the cow two hun- 
dred and seventy-six, the sheep three hundred and eighty- 
seven. To this, says that observant old naturalist, Benjamin 
Stillingfleet, is to be referred that capital economy which 
knows that when eight cows have been in a pasture, and can 
no longer get nourishment, two horses will do very well 
there for some days ; and when the horses have taken all 
they care for, four sheep will still find supplies. There are 
few things more curious in rural life than to watch a cow 
while grazing, and see how she will push aside the butter- 
cups. Some animals care only for what is harsh, as the 
camel, whose greatest relish is an oasis of tough, prickly 
bushes, such as the ass itself would turn away from. Thus 
consumed, by one animal or other, it follows, that no plant 



SPECIALITIES OF FOOD. 



65 



is absolutely uneatable, no plant, indeed, absolutely poison- 
oits, but only poisonous to particular creatures. Probably 
there is not a single species of the vegetable kingdom but is 
eaten, or partly eaten, by a creature appointed to it, how- 
ever distasteful and even deleterious it may be to others. 
The horse gives up the water-hemlock to the goat ; the goat 
leaves the monkshood for the horse ; if man eats of either 
plant, he dies. Slugs eat that very poisonous toadstool, the 
Agaricus muscarius ; also the Agaricus phalloides, a species 
still more terrible from the rapidity of its deadly effect. 
Though the leaves of the laurel are so obnoxious to insects 
in general as to be the readiest poison for them with the 
entomologist, the caterpillar of one kind, the Orgyia antiqua, 
finds them wholesome. When driven by famine, it would 
seem, nevertheless, that there are no creatures but what will 
eat of other kinds of food than they ordinarily select, and 
which they are fitted for by nature. Spallanzani made a 
pigeon live on flesh, and an eagle on bread. Animals 
domesticated by man, and thus leading a semi-artificial life, 
will, apart from necessity, also curiously change their habits 
as to food. In some parts of Persia, according to Fraser, 
" the cattle have but little pasture ; . . . the chief article of 
their food is dried fish, which, with pounded date-stones, is 
all they get to eat for a considerable portion of the year." 
Every one is acquainted with the extraordinary eating 
powers of insects. With these creatures, eating seems 
ordained less for the preservation of the individual than for 
the destruction of effete organic matter, a fact peculiarly 
observable in the Diptera and the Coleoptera. Some kinds 
seem created chiefly to overpower other insects. Were it 
not for the carnivorous lady-birds, the fat, green, vegetarian 
aphides, which infest the stalks of so many of our sweetest 
flowers, would be a thousand times more troublesome. 
6 « 



66 FOOD OF MAN. 

" Exactly what browsing flocks and herds of deer are to the 
quadruped of prey, the tribes of aphides are to the lady- 
birds, and some two or three allies of the Coccinella race ; 
save for which destroyers, not a lover of sweet posies could 
gather a rose or a honeysuckle undefiled." To the execution 
of these ofiices by the insect tribe, the almost incalculable 
number of their species, the extremely rapid multiplication 
of many, the unparalleled voracity of others, and the quick- 
ness with which digestion is carried in their very short intes- 
tinal canal, all tend to contribute. Fishes, and marine 
animals in general, perform the same ofiices for the sea that 
insects subserve ujDon the land ; incessantly destroying and 
devouring, they contribute immensely to the preservation of 
its purity ; some, as crabs, consuming indiscriminately both 
dead and living prey, and in their cruel and greedy habits 
reiterating those of the hyena and the wolf. The stomachs 
of these creatures, like those of many fishes, not infrequently 
contain abundance of beautiful little shells, principally 
microscopic, gathered up during their travels in the country 
of the mermaids. 

32. Man, in a limited sense, is omnivorous; not absolutely; 
he cannot eat many things which to inferior creatures are 
pleasant, as bones, and the leaves of trees. Whether, as to 
first intent, he is an herbivorous or a carnivorous animal, is 
a question only for enthusiasts. His anatomical structure 
supplies an equal argument for either side. Helvetius and 
others deeming that it proves a carnivorous nature ; and the 
modern school of vegetarians, an herbivorous one. Rous- 
seau ingeniously urges, in support of the latter view, that 
woman is a uniparous animal, and provided with no more 
than two breasts, circumstances predominant among the 
females of the brute herbivora; while in the females of the 
brute carnivora, the number is in both cases considerably 



FOOD OF MAN. 67 

higher.* Man is not intended to live upon either kind of 
food by itself. Inhabiting every variety of .climate, he 
would have been ill provided for, if so restricted ; as it is, 
he can dwell in countries which aiford only animal food, or 
only vegetable food. There are nations who have little 
within reach besides dates, yams, and the ivory-nut; in the 
extreme north, there is nothing to be had but flesh. Pro- 
bably enough, the number of human beings who subsist on 
fruits and farinaceous roots is preponderant. Though ani- 
mal food is so largely consumed in cold countries, the inha- 
bitants of the sunnier and warmer parts of the earth derive 
their chief nourishment from trees and plants. This, how- 
ever, is no proof of its superior adaptedness; there can be 
little doubt that human aliments prepared from the flesh of 
animals, are, generally speaking, both more nutritious and 
more digestible. The herbivorous creatures killed for the 
table having already converted the nutrient substances of 
the vegetable world into animal matter, our own digestive 
organs are saved the labor. The cow, the sheep, the deer, 
are natural bridges between the grass of the field and the 
human body. 

33. Not less interesting than the variety of the food of 
different animals is the variety in the organs by which are 
accomplished the two preliminary processes of nutrition, or 
prehension and mastication. So rigidly, moreover, are they 
modeled according to the character of the food upon which 
the animal subsists, that we may infer what it eats by merely 
observing its extremities and mouth. Feet, for instance, of 
the kind called hoofs, are incapable of seizing living prey ; 
so that all creatures which possess them are necessarily her- 
bivorous. Indeed, there is scarcely an organ of the animal 



* Sur I' Origine de Vinegalite parmi les homines. Note 6. CEuvres, 
tome iii., pp. 193 — 195, very curious and amusing. 



68 HUNGER THE SOURCE OP MORAL ORDER. 

frame but serves a more or less direct purpose in regard to 
feeding, the wing, the fin, the claw, all are bestowed towards 
this end; so likewise is that amazing quickness of the senses 
which makes the sight, the hearing, the smell of many pre- 
daceous quadrupeds and birds so vastly superior to that of 
man.* The organ peculiarly identified with the feeding of 
animals, and which is commonly allowed to be a distinctive 
characteristic when compared with plants, namely, the sto- 
mach, is given them because of their powers of locomotion. 
Vegetables, fixed in the soil, and feeding by their leaves 
and spongioles on the matter which envelopes them, do not 
require a special organ of digestion, into which food can be 
received in bulk. Animals, on the other hand, are obliged 
to take their food at intervals, not so much suited to their 
wants as to their opportunities of obtaining it. Between 
the feeding of brutes and mankind, the only essential differ- 
ence is, that while the former consume their food in the 
state in which it is yielded by nature, man, even in his 
rudest condition, subjects it, for the most part, to some kind 
of cookery. Man, it has been said humorously, is "the 
cooking animal." 

34. The mere knowledge of the waste of the tissues, and 
of the organic need for food thence arising, would not be a 
sufficient provocative to eat. Absorbed in darling occupa- 
tions, many men would never think of taking food, did not 
hunger at last impel them. As a physical agent, hunger is 
thus of an importance impossible to over-rate : and its moral 
value is necessarily commensurate. It is the chief source 
of social order ; for if mankind could do without food, they 
would be out of reach of rule and control, and necessary 



* See for illustration in detail, Sir T. C. Morgan's "Sketches of 
the Philosophy of Life," chap, iii., "The Combination of Organs and 
Functions." 



LEGITIMATE ENJOYMENT OF FOOD. 69 

subordination would not exist. " Hunger," says Bray, 
" has been the chief source of man's progression, seeing that 
it constitutes, principally, that necessity which is the mother 
of invention. "VVe might, perhaps, have been made to do 
without eating and drinking; but instead of this being a bless- 
ing, we should thereby be destitute of the most potent stimu- 
lus of the mental powers, upon the action of which powers 
happiness wholly depends. The privilege of requiring no 
bread would not be equal to the advantages man derives 
from the law of nature which compels him to earn it by the 
sweat of his brow ; for nature has imposed no more labor 
than is pleasurable and necessary to health — unjust laws 
and regulations with respect to the distribution of the pro- 
ducts of human labor, compel the majority to toil more 
than is consistent with health and happiness — but more 
fatal than unjust laws would it be to the well-being of soci- 
ety, if all necessity for exertion were abrogated.* No one 
need think ill of eating, or of any of its associations, except 
the abuse. Good, substantial, wholesome food, properly 
cooked, and neatly served up, is one of the highest proofs 
and privileges of civilization; it is a criterion of every well- 
conducted household, and of every true and clever wife ; 
while the legitimate enjoyment of it is one of the_most 
honest and innocent of pleasures. All sensible and good- 
natured people are fond of eating ; and one of the pleasant- 
est things it is possible either to feel in one's self or to wit- 
ness in another, is a healthy and natural readiness for the 
bounties of the table. To satisfy nature without surfeiting 
it, is one of the foremost of the " good works " we are re- 
quired to enact. Thankful enjoyment of our daily bread is 
no small part of Christianity. If "lying lips" "be an 
abomination to the Lord," so is the ingratitude of asceti- 



* " Philosopliy of Necessity." Vol. i. 



70 ENJOYMENT OF FOOD A DUTY. 

cism ; and infinitely more so, the dyspepsia which disables 
the intemperate from the great, universal duty of all man- 
kind to have a good appetite. While all possible forms of 
intemperance and excess are denounced both in the Old 
Testament and New, the substantial viands gathered from 
the fields and the vineyards, the firstlings of the flocks and 
herds, the fig, the olive, and the pure juice of the grape, are 
promised, over and over again, as the rewards of virtuous 
toil, and catalogued with the blessings to be received in this 
lower world. " I have no patience," says a wise writer, 
" with those who pretend not to care for their dinner, or the 
ludicrous assumption that 'spiritual' negations imply su- 
perior souls. A man who is careless about his dianer, is 
generally one of flaccid body and feeble mind. As old 
Samuel Johnson authoritatively said — ' Sir, a man seldom 
thinks of anything with more earnestness than he thinks 
of his dinner; and if he cannot get that well dressed, he may 
he suspected of inaccuracy in other things.' When a man 
is not basely insensible to hunger of soul, the keen intellec- 
tual voracities and emotional desires, he is all the healthier, 
all the stronger, all the better for a noble capacity for food — 
a capacity which becomes noble when it ministers to a fine, 
and not merely to a gluttonous nature."* Even a plain 
diet is but half-good. It cannot be doubted that, on the 
whole, refinement, in board as well as lodging — being a 
fruit of intelligence — is favorable alike to health and lon- 
gevity. There are advantages we little think of in those 
culinary ingenuities which, not significantly adding to the 
cost of our food — in fact, reducing it, by subserving to di- 
minish waste — at once modify and neutralize ill flavours, 
and so greatly augment its pleasant sapidity. The pleasure 
of meal-times is one of the prerogatives of human nature. 



* " Sea-side Studies." BlaekivoocV s Magazine, September, 1856. 



EVILS OF INSUFFICIENT FOOD. 71 

The lower mammalia — the only other animals who appear 
to enjoy the favor of their food — are insensible to haut-gout. 
Graminivorous birds and most kinds of fishes not only have 
cartilaginous tongues, which prevent them from tasting, but 
swallow their food whole, guided probably to the choice of 
it by sight rather than taste or smell. Fishes seem to de- 
pend entirely on the eye, if we may judge from the readiness 
with which they swallow artificial bait. Man's palate, in 
short, was not given him for nothing; but to procure 
pleasures for him commensurate with his patrician rank. 

35. The benefits which accrue to the body from supplying 
it with a sufiiciency of wholesome food, show in the strongest 
light the evils which result from wisufficiency. Disease is 
one of the first. Many diseases are induced by it, many 
are aggravated. Sanitary movements having reference to 
the poor, cannot possibly efiect any lasting amelioration of 
their condition so long as they go short of proper aliment. 
It is worthy the attention of philanthropists, that epidemic 
and pestilential diseases in particular are far more widely 
fatal in their ravages among the ill-fed than among the 
well-fed. Certainly there are several such diseases which 
assail rich and poor alike — small-pox, measles, and scarlet- 
fever, for example ; but even these are much more destruc- 
tive when they attack persons who have been forced to sub- 
sist on poor or too scanty nourishment. Legislators, no less 
than the charitable, may find in this fact, a vitally import- 
ant principle of action. Insufficiency overprolonged in- 
duces the slow and miserable death of starvation, and no 
physical calamity can be conceived of as more terrible. 
Yet starvation — actual, killing starvation — is perhaps the 
least part of the injury to the human race which comes of 
privation of needful sustenance. Actual death from hun- 
ger is only an occasional thing. The evils which accrue 
from the debilitating efiects of customary stint, life still drag- 



72 ■ EFFECTS OF A STARVING DIETARY. 

ging on, are incalculably more extended and severe. Even 
the physical disease which they engender is a slight evil 
compared with the impeded mental action which must needs 
follow. A miserable, starving dietary, while it weakens the 
body, half-paralyzes the soul, and not seldom leads direct to 
insanity itself. When we remember how entirely the brain 
depends for its nourishment upon the blood, and that if this 
sovereign pabulum of life and nervous energy be either di- 
minished in quantity or deteriorated in quality, no organ of 
the body can possibly work well, how easy it is to see that 
between insufficient, innutritious diet, and prostration of 
mind, there is little less than an inevitable connection. 
Every man has experienced the feeling of debility which at- 
tends hunger but a little longer unsatisfied than usual, and 
how swift and lively is the revival of every function of the 
mind as well as body which follows its proper gratification. 
The difficulty of awakening the intelligence of a poorly-fed 
child compared with that of the well-nourished one, is 
known to every observant teacher in town Sunday-schools. 
Intellectual productions which are born, not as literature 
should always and only be, of the soul's going to it as the 
hart to the water-brooks, but of the howling of the dogs of 
hunger, betray no less plainly their miserable origin. Think- 
ing, like acting, requires a good substratum of physical nou- 
rishment. Genius, though it has sometimes turned to vege- 
tarianism, is rarely found adhering to it; all its greatest 
works have been achieved on a basis of generous diet. This 
is not all. Where the body is debilitated by hunger, the 
affections also are necessarily dull, and little excitable to 
anything better than sensualities. Any man who has been 
compelled to undergo the hardships of fasting, whether by 
poverty, or the exigencies of travel in remote places, knows 
the gradual inroad of cross-grained views, indolence, and 
recklessness on an emj^ty stomach. The crowning and 



CHRISTIANITY BEGINS WITH PHYSICAL SUCCOR. 73 

deadly evil which comes of insufficient nourishment is, ac- 
cordingly, the vitiation of man's moral nature ; and what a 
lesson is there in this for the Home Missionaries of Christia- 
nity and their patrons ! It is no less vain than aggravating 
to preach faith and loving-kindness where father and mother 
and children lie huddled together in the pains and apathy 
of hunger. To the starving, religion may well appear folly 
and hypocrisy ; nor is it any marvel that it should fail to 
interest them. So long as the gospel is proffered without its 
proper preface of ministry to man's physical necessities, the 
poor must not only be expected to decliae it, but they are 
not altogether unjustified in so doing, for God requires no 
man to take sermons and benedictions as a substitute for 
the bread which the body needs. Every one knows how 
unamiable even the best-fed are liable to become if kept 
too long waiting for their meals — how inaccessible they are 
at such times to appeals which after dinner meet most gra- 
cious response.* Is it surprising, then, that religious truth 
should find more indifierence than welcome among the hun- 
gry and half-nourished ? It is difficult for a famished man 
to believe that there is a Father in heaven till he feels that 
he has brothers on earth. If there be one farce more 
wretched than another, it is the building a "Eagged 
Church" and holding "special religious services" as the 
first thing indispensable to the bettering the condition of 
the poor.f 

* Voltaire knew this well when he told place-seekers — " II faut 
toujours prendre moUia fandi tempora. II y a une grande analogie 
entre les intestines et nos passions, notre maniere de penser, notre 
conduite." 

t See for illustrative details on the general subject, "An Inquiry 
into the Morbid Effects of Deficiency of Food, chiefly with reference 
to their occurrence among the Destitute Poor." By K. B. Howard, 
M. D. London and Manchester, 1839. 
7 D 



74 EVIL CONSEQUENCES OF EXCESS. 

36. Too much food is as bad as too little. To sacrifice to 
the stomach that nervous energy which ought to be devoted 
to the brain, the organ of our most ennobling and most 
pleasurable faculties, is, in fact, so far as regards the reten- 
tion of genuine manliness, little better than to commit sui- 
cide outright. Disease, though probably a third part of all 
that there is in the world is attributable to this cause, is, as 
in a former instance, the least of the evils that have to be 
affiliated on ill-regulated eating : infinitely more dire are 
the peevishness and ill-humor which it engenders, the gloomy, 
hypochondriacal and dissatisfied tempers which generally 
overtake the intemperate eater and drinker, and make him 
a pest both to himself and to society. Many a man's fall 
and ruin have come of the overloaded and thence disordered 
stomach of another ; as many a man's rise and prosperity 
of another's temperance and cheerful health. No less" 
destructive is intemperance to the intellectual energies. 
The intellects which lie sunk in sluggishness through over- 
loading the stomach, are incomparably more numerous than 
those which are slow and stupid by nature. The authors 
themselves of their condition, the cross and imbecile through 
over-feeding, do not belong to society proper; they are not 
human, yet neither are they brutes, for no brute is intem- 
perate; no longer men, gluttons and drunkards form an 
outside class by themselves, the nobleness of their nature to 
be estimated, as in all other cases, by the quality and end 
of their delights. It is worthy of remark, that nothing is 
more speedily and certainly destructive also of the beauty 
of the countenance. Diet and regimen are the best of cos- 
metics; to preserve a fair and bright complexion, the diges- 
tive organs need primary attention. 

37. It is a striking and highly-suggestive fact in human 
economy, and one here deserving to be noticed, that the two 
physical powers which have most intimate relation with life, 



HUNGER AND LOVE THE WORLD'S MINISTERS. 75 

the one, to its maintenance in the individual, the other to 
its communication to new beings, should be precisely those 
which, while they fill it with energy by right exercise, and 
confer the keenest of sensuous pleasures, are contrariwise the 
very powers through which may be inflicted, by abuse, the 
deepest injuries it is susceptible of Eating and drinking, 
attended to as nature directs, are the essential origin of 
every animal pleasure, and the basis of moral and intellec- 
tual happiness; similarly, the initiative of the sweet privi- 
lege of offspring invigorates both body and mind,* and is 
the foundation of home and its smiling circle, with all the 
dearest and most beautiful affections of humanity. The 
punishments, on the other hand, which fall upon abuse of 
the first, are paralleled exactly in the intellectual dulness, the 
melancholy, the pusillanimity and weariness of life which 
form the inevitable retribution of excess in the other. By 
Hunger and Love is the world held together and sweetened ; 
by Hunger and Love is it disgraced and made wretched. 
These are the two poles of the little world of human nature, 
round which everything else revolves; the very structure of 
the body in its relation to them corresponding with and 
resulting from the polar idea. It may be added, that where 
one of these great institutions is honored, there also, for the 
most part, is the other; where either is profaned, the pro- 
fanation extends to both. Though temperance and purity 
may sometimes not coexist in nice balance, no two things 
are ever more frequently in company than gluttony, over- 
drinking, and immodesty. It is in the intimate relation 
which they bear to life that the reason exists why in all 



* See on the latter points, Feuchsterleben's "Principles of Medi- 
cal Psychology," (Sydenham Society's vol., 1847,) sect. 67, p. 181. 
Tlie author cites an extraordinary instance in "Casanova, who at 
such moments solved the most difficult mathematical problems." 



76 SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OP EATING. 

ages there has been an intuitive reverence in rightly-ordered 
minds for the seal of sexual love; and why a species of sanc- 
tity has from the earliest days of history attached to eating 
and drinking, which in ancient times entered largely into 
religious ceremonies, as they do now and will for ever in the 
most sacred rite of Christianity. "Eating and drinking," 
says Feuerbach, "are themselves religious acts, or at least 
ought to be so. With every mouthful, we should think of 
the God who gave it." It is but an amplification of the 
custom, which commences every procedure of interest or 
importance with a plentiful spread upon the table. It may 
not be suspected, and is often dishonored, but the origin of 
the practice at least was a devout one. Friendship pursues 
the same course ; because, as life is the most precious of pos- 
sessions, tlie highest act of goodness that generous sentiment 
can perform is to provide means for its maintenance and 
prolongation. To offer food is symbolical of sincerely wish- 
ing health and longevity. How beautiful are affection and 
the gift of nourishment united in the first tenderness of the 
mother towards her babe ! She loves and she feeds. Even 
the plant, when it opens its seed-pods and lets its offspring 
fall to the earth, bestows upon each little embryo an imita- 
tive bosom in the milk-like farina which encloses it, and 
which suckles it during germination. 



CHAPTER V. 

TSE ATMOSPHEJtE IN ITS REZATIOy TO I^IFE. 

38. By the Air — in repose the atmosphere, in movement 
the wind — "we live, and move, and have our being." So 
with all other living creatures. The very word "animal," 
signifies "breather." "Animated nature" means breathing 
nature; "inanimate" that which does not breathe. The 
corresponding Greek terms C^<;oc and ^ojov are similarly 
derived, through ^dco, to live, from dew, to breathe, and 
the intensitive prefix ^a.. Grateful for these expressive 
figures, the poetic Greeks reflected them on to their source, 
calling the summer breezes the zephyrs, literally the "life- 
bringers." Zephyrus was emphatically the west wind, and 
deified, was said to produce flowers and fruit by the sweet- 
ness of his breath, charmingly alluded to by Homer in his 
description of the gardens of Alcinous.* Zehi; or Jupiter 



* Odyssey vii. 119. Compare Virgil — 

" Zephyris cum Iseta vocantibus sestas ;" 

" When gay summer comes, invited by tlie zephyrs." 

Georgia iii. 322. 

See also Lib. ii. 330. Modern poets have freely taken up the 
idea, and often with great elegance and success, as in the " Paradiso" 
of Dante, — 

In quella parte, ove surge ad aprire 
Zeffiro dolce le novelle fronde 
Di che si vede Europa rivestire. — Canto xii. 46-48. 
" In that clime where rises the sweet zephyr to unfold the new 
leaves wherein Europe sees herself fresh clothed." 

7 * 77 



78 MORAL INFLUENCES OF THE ATMOSPHERE. 

himself was originally only a personification of the air 
whence it is that in the poets his names are not uncommonly 
used in the place of aer and aura, as in the mains Jupiter, 
sub Jove frigido, &c., of Horace, and when Theocritus says 
that Zsh^ "is one while indeed fair, but at another time he 
rains." Aratus styles the air Zsh;; fuarxb^, the physical 
God. ^schylus gives it the epithet "divine." Virgil de- 
scribes it as omnipotens pater ^ther. "But can air," says 
Cicero, "which hath no form, be God? For the Deity must 
necessarily be not only of some form, but the most beau- 
tiful." The mediate source of life to every occupant of 
earth. Hare describes it beautifully as the "unfathomable 
ether, that emblem of Omnipresent Deity, which everywhere 
enfolding and supporting man, yet baffles his senses, and is 
unperceived, except when he looks upwards and contem=^ 
plates it above him." 

39. The air is the great physician of the world. Health 
confides in it as its most faithful friend. The weak it invi- 
gorates, the weary it refreshes. What is more grateful than 
to go from a close room into the pure, blowing breath of 
heaven, even if it be but on a barren highway ! What more 
animating and delicious than to exchange the hot, perspiring 
streets for the breezes of the hills or of the sea! It minis- 
ters largely even to our moral well-being. Children at 
boarding-schools are always better disposed to be diligent 
and well-behaved when the day has been commenced with a 
walk in the fresh air. Under its genial stimulus we forget 
our vexations and disappointments, we become cheerful and 
vivacious, and thence — ^what without cheerfulness is impos- 
sible — more willing "to refuse the evil and choose the good." 
No wonder that the jDoets seem never in happier mood than 
when the wind is perceived wafting through their verses — 



THE ATMOSPHERE NEEDFUL TO BEAUTY. 79 

This castle hath a pleasant seat ; the air 
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself 
Unto our gentle senses. 

This guest of summer, 
The temple haunting martlet, doth approve 
By his lov'd mansionry, that the heavens' breath 
Smells wooingly here. 

Far more intimate than we suppose is the relation of the 
atmosphere to the spiritual and intellectual. Nothing so 
powerfully stimulates intellectual productiveness, where the 
slightest capacity for it is present, as a walk in a gently- 
blowing wind. To the brilliant purity of the atmosphere of 
Athens, and of Greece in general, and the happy tempera- 
ture of the gales which fanned its hills, so favorite a topic 
with the panegyrists of that lovely country, are justly 
ascribed "the preeminence in learning, taste, literature, and 
the arts, in all that constituted aoipia in its widest accepta- 
tion, which distinguished Athens among the nations of the 
civilized world."* ^schylus enumerates among the bless- 
ings of a highly-favored land, "the gales of the winds blow- 
ing with clear sunshine." Pindar gives the same to the 
Islands of the Blest, "where shine the golden flowers." 

40. At all times and seasons, with all forms and condi- 
tions of beings, it is no less the function of the Air to 
embellish. Who so rosy in the cheek as they who oftenest 
seek the pure country air! How does the plainest face 
improve, as it blushes under the courtship of the summer 
breezes ! Virgil, with the true poetic instinct, makes JEneas 
owe his beauty to the heavenly breath of Venus — 



* Consult, upon the connection of the Greek and Italian atmos- 
phere with their sculpture, Winckelman's "History of Art among 
the Ancient Greeks," Part 1, section 3. 



80 THE ATMOSPHERE NEEDFUL TO BEAUTY. 

Namque ipsa decoram 
Csesariem nato genitrix, lumenque juventse 
Purpureum, et Isetos oculis affidrat honores. 

" For Venus herself had adorned her son with graceful locks, 
flushed him with the radiant bloom of youth, and breathed a 
sprightly lustre on his eyes." 

The wind is necessary even to the vitalizing of the aspects 
of insensate nature. Scenes dull and uninviting in its 
absence, become pleasant when we visit them under the 
inspiration of a breeze ; the loveliest lose in charm if the 
winds be asleep, though viewed by the light of summer. 
For this is not merely because the zephyrs temper the too 
fervent heat of the sunbeams, and by their physical action 
on the lungs and system generally give buoyancy "and elas- 
ticity to the limbs, and thus enlarge our capacity for enjoy- 
ment. Nature never shows so lovely when still as when in 
movement; and it is by the wind that all her charms of 
motion are produced, whether of the clouds, or the trees, or 
the corn-fields, or the delicate stalks of the harebells. The 
grandeur of the unceasing roll of the sea, though partly 
owing to another cause, proves in itself how mighty an ally 
to whatever is competent to become beautiful or sublime, is 
this viewless and marvelous visitant. Motion embellishes 
nature thus largely, because it is an emblem and character- 
istic of life, to contemplate which, is one of the soul's highest 
pleasures, by reason of its own vitality. It loves to behold 
its immortality pictured in the outward world, be it ever so 
faintly; and if it meet no reflex in its surveys, feels de- 
frauded and unsatisfied. The correspondence of the forms 
of nature with the particular elements of ovir spiritual being, 
encourages this secret love of movement so strong within the 
soul ; for the soul not only sees in external nature the 
counterparts of its elements and qualities, but reflections 



THE ATMOSPHERE AND THE SENSES. 81 

likewise of its activities and deeds. The swaying of the 
trees, the bending of the flowers, the waving of the corn, 
severally picture occurrences in the inner life — the one kind 
promoted by the wind of nature, the other by the Spirit of 
God. 

41. We depend upon the atmosphere for the effectuation 
of the powers of sense. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin or 
seat of touch, would all be impotent without it. Our phy- 
sical power of seeing, for example, depends on our inhabit- 
ing an atmosphere competent to receive and diffuse the light 
transmitted from the sun ; and our power of feeling in its 
equal adaptedness to receive and diffuse the solar heat. 
There is no feeling where there is no warmth ; what greater 
antagonism than between cold and sensation? No sound 
would exist in nature, if there were not an atmosphere 
sensible to vibra;tions ; here is its needfulness to hearing. 
So with odors and flavors, which it is only by inhalation we 
distinguish and enjoy — here are smell and taste. If we 
want to avoid the bitterness of physic, we hold the breath ; 
if to feast on some rich bounty to the palate, we inspire. 
How beautiful, again, is the imagery here disclosed ! As 
the atmosphere gives ability to see and hear physically, so 
does the divine life, as it flows into man's soul, fill him with 
power to exercise Intellect and Affection, which are spiritual 
sight and feeling. Love, or the will-principle, has from the 
beginning been "warmth," and Intelligence, or the mental 
eye, " light." Doubtless, man may pervert these inestimable 
■ gifts ; just as the earth, which keeps fashion and pace with 
him in everything, applies the pure, sacred sunshine to the 
production of thorns and nettles as well as flowers. But he 
has no intellectual or affectional power within him, but what 
is communicated from God ; just as he has no power of see- 
ing or of feeling but what he owes momentarily and con- 
tinuously to the sun or its derivatives. All that man receives 

D« 



82 SPIRITUAL ANALOGIES OP LIGHT AND MUSIC. 

is heavenly; only what he prepares in and of himself, is 
bad. The atmosphere brings day-light though the sun be 
obscured. However overcast the skies, there is yet pro- 
duced sufficient illumination by the refracting properties of 
the atmosphere to constitute day. Here is shown, that how- 
ever thick the clovids which rise up to interpose between 
God and our hearts, he himself is ever shining steadily 
beyond them, and in his benevolence transmits to us suffi- 
cient for our needs. God never deserts any one, not even 
the most wicked ; " He is kind even to the unthankful and 
the evil ;" and though man, like the earth sending up its 
dense vapors, may shut out the direct sunbeams which de- 
scend towards him, he is still provided with a diffused light 
of refreshing, energizing succor, brought by the all-per- 
vading, all-penetrating Spirit. "Whither shall I go from 
thy Spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence ?" From 
the same circumstance, i. e. the refracting properties of the 
atmosphere, we enjoy the solar light for a long time before 
the sun actually rises above the horizon, and for as long a 
period after its setting. In the evening, when by the rota- 
tion of the earth the sun itself is made to disappear, beams 
of light are still passed into the higher regions of the air, 
and thence diffiised downwards to the surface of the earth, 
so that for a while we are unconscious of the loss. Except 
for this beautiful provision, the evening sun would in a 
moment set, and the earth be shrouded in sudden darkness. 
In the morning, by a similar process of irradiation, the 
atmosphere receives and sheds abroad beams which are not 
yet visible, 

42. The eye and the ear, or sight and hearing, are the 
types and continents of the senses generally. So, in the 
conveyance by the atmosphere of light and sound, is 
summed ujd, representatively, all that it is the function of 
the Divine life to communicate. For sound, when its tones 



ANALOGIES OP LIGHT AND MUSIC. 83 

are agreeable and harmonious, is music, and music is objec- 
tive or visible nature reiterated in a vocal form — the audi- 
ble .counterpart of whatever is lovely and perfect to the eye. 
Hence the wonderful and enchanting variety in the sounds 
of nature ; a variety sufficient, as we have elsewhere seen, to 
furnish the foundations of all language.* The dashing of 
waterfalls, the roar of the sea, the voices of the trees in their 
different kinds, each intoning to the wind in a new mode, 
together with the multitudinous diversities of utterance 
proper to the animate part of creation, are not mere acci- 
dental results of physical conformation, nor are they mean- 
ingless or arbitrary gifts. Every one of them is inseparably 
identified with the object that utters it, because of an origi- 
nal and immutable agreement in quality. Music, in its es- 
sential nature, is an expression of the Creator as truly as 
his objective works. Expressed in forms, the air presents 
him to the eye — the organ preeminently of the intellect : 
expressed in sounds, it presents him to the ear — the organ 
sacred to the affections. When we listen to a beautiful 
melody or " air," it is surveying a charming and varied 
landscape, vivid with life, and adorned with innumerable 
elegances, only addressed to another sense — heard instead 
of seen. It is not only a sublime fact that God thus doubly 
places himself before us — it is a necessary result of his very 
nature ; for music stirs the soul so deeply because of its pri- 
mitive relation to his goodness, and thus to everything con- 
nected with our emotional life; objective nature, on the 
other hand, so largely delights the intellect (having only a 
secondary influence on the heart), because it is fashioned 
after the ideas of his wisdom. Each, moreover, assumes its 
loveliest when the other is in company, because in Him 



* " Figurative Language : its Origin and Constitution," chapters 
7 and 8. 



84 A CHARACTERISTIC OF ORGANIC LIFE. 

their prototypes are married. Never is nature so beautiful 
as when we view it in the hearing of true music; in no 
place does music sound so sweet as amid her responsive and 
tranquil retreats. 

Why should we go in ? 
My friend Stephano, signify, I pray you, 
Within the house, your mistress is at hand, 
And bring your music forth into the air. 
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music 
Creep in our ears. 

Echo, due like other sounds to the agency of the atmosphere, 
exemplifies the same fine truths. The sympathy we feel 
with the objective forms of nature is the equivalent of the 
agreeable answers with which she acknowledges our voice. 
Echo, in her beautiful and undelayed replies, is the image 
and emblem of the responses in which the emotions of man's 
spirit, when he addresses himself to God, are immediately 
reflected back upon himself, coming invisibly, he knows not 
whence, but with a magical and most sweet power. No 
wonder that the poets have in all ages given Echo a fond 
and grateful mention.* 

43. Let us pass on to the consideration of the air in its 
immediate bearing upon the maintenance of organic life. 



* What can be more beautiful than the following, in the " Per- 
sians" of Jilschylus {livu yt jiLvtol k. t. X. 386-391) — "When Day, 
drawn by white steeds, had overspread the earth, resplendent to be- 
hold, first of all a shout from the Greeks greeted Echo like a song, 
and Echo from the island rock in the same moment shouted back an 
inspiring cry." Moschus, in his elegy on Bion, and Bion, in his own 
sweet poem upon the death of Adonis, represent Echo as sharing in 
their lamentations, as does Milton, bewailing Lycidas. Other ele- 
gant allusions occur in Horace, Odes 1, 20 ; Tasso, Gerusalemme xi. 
11; Euripides, Shakspere, Camoens, Shelley, and Byron, particularly 
one in Manfred. 



RESPIRATION IN AGREEMENT WITH VIGOR. 85 

Grand as are the capacities of the vital stimuli, or heat, 
light, and electricity, and invaluable as are the uses sub- 
served by feeding, it remains incontestably true that without 
continuous supplies of fresh air. Life cannot go on. We 
are forever referred back to Respiration as the prime cha- 
racteristic of a healthy, living creature. The assimilation 
of food may be suspended for a time ; darkness and severe 
cold may be endured, the former even for years ; but respi- 
ration must be steady, or the creature dies. Every living 
thing breathes more or less ; only the lowest forms of animal 
life can bear intermissions of breathing for any considerable 
period ; even the foul parasites called Entozoa cannot live 
without air, though secluded by their position from direct 
contact with the atmosphere. Entophytal fungi, or those 
which are found in the interior of other plants, and some- 
times in the bodies of animals, are for the most part only 
the mycelia of species which the imperfect supply of air 
prevents from developing into the perfect form. 

44. Not only is life, as a whole, inseparable from respira- 
tion, but every variety in the manifestation of life. Where 
resjDiration is vigorous, as in the feathered tribes, life is ener- 
getic ; where it is feeble, as in the reptile, life is slow. Similar 
phenomena pertain to the various epochs of life. " The rest- 
lessness of the child, and the activity of the boy, correspond 
with the vigor of their breathing: the calmness and power 
of the man are combined with a usually tranquil respiration, 
capable of being increased to the utmost as occasion calls 
for the higher energies of life; in the old man, deliberate in 
his movements, respiration is limited, and usually slow." 
Breathing varies even with the condition of the body, and 
its employments. We breathe differently in sickness and in 
health; differently asleep and awake; differently in the per- 
formance of every action of our animal organs. We breathe 
in one mode when we walk, in another when we run. Breath- 

8 



86 OBJECT OF RESPIRATION. 

ing, accordingly, is not only a physiological but a representa- 
tive phenomenon. In the respiratory breast dwell, along 
with its health, magnanimity and heroic courage ; where the 
breathing is languid, we look but for timorousness and de- 
bility. In our own species, the face itself, the silent echo of 
the heart, is not a more faithful index to our states, either 
of body or mind, than is our breathing. As the emotions 
manifest themselves in the play of the muscles and the light 
of the eyes, as they are shown, too, in the tone of voice, in the 
harshness, the tremor, the asperity or the sweetness of the 
uttered sound, and are interpreted thereby, so is it with the 
attendant breathmg. Let us but hear how a person is 
breathing, and though he be out of sight we may infer to a 
certain extent, how he is employed, and judge of his general 
tranquility or the reverse. See what testimony to it there 
is in Language ! To be " animated," to be " spirited," or 
"full of spirits," is to have breath in plenty. To be "out 
of spirits," " spiritless," or " dispirited," is to be destitute of 
breath; literally in every case; for all agreeable, lively, or 
"life-like" emotions, tend to raise and quicken the breath, 
while depressing ones tend to lower and deaden it. Eager- 
ness pants; despondency sighs; weariness yawns; extreme 
fear makes us breathless or "aghast."* 

45. The object of respiration is closely allied to that of 
Feeding; nay, it is no other than that of feeding. Consist- 
ing of an infinite number of little stomachs, closely asso- 
ciated and connected, but feeding upon aerial and gaseous 
food instead of terrestrial and solid, such as is received into 
the cavity of the stomach proper, the Lungs are no less im- 
mediately concerned in the maintenance of the health and 



* See for an admirable development of the ■whole subject, Garth 
Wilkinson's banquet-like chapter of the Lungs, in "The Human 
Body, and its connexion with Man." 



OBJECT OP RESPIRATION. 87 

vigor of the blood than the great, proper stomach itself. 
Not only does the blood require to be nourished with the 
products of digestion, but to be freely and regularly aerated, 
not to have air directly admitted to it, but to be brought 
into that j)eculiar proximity to the air which is effected by 
the process of natural breathing. This, in the mammalia, 
takes place, as we are all aware, in the lungs. Immediately 
the blood enters these organs, in the process of circulation, 
the fact is signalled by certain nerves to the medulla oblon- 
gata.'^ In an instant, obedient to an imperious order sent 
back through certain other nerves, the diaphragm and 
muscles of the ribs expand the chest, and thus enlarge its 
cavity. A vacuum would now be caused, but the air, rush- 
ing down from without, fills every corner, and in so doing, 
aerates the awaiting blood, feeding it with oxygen, and re- 
ceiving carbon in exchange. Then the various muscles 
renew their play; but this time so as to contract, instead of 
expand the chest, the lungs ea;spire, instead of wispiring, the 
carbon is ejected by the mouth and nostrils, and the series 
of actions constituting a respiration is complete. Renewed 
by the oxygen thus communicated, the blood now moves on 
again to the heart, whence it was first propelled, and whence 
it is again transmitted to the body, again to be carbonized 
and weakened, and in due course to be returned into the 
lungs for refreshment as before. Thus is the history of the 
lungs inseparable from that of the heart. Complementary 
to one another, these two noble organs, the heart and the 
lungs, and their functions, circulation and respiration, form 
a beautiful duality in unity, representing in the body the 



* Medulla oblongata is the name given by anatomists to a peculiar 
organ contained within the skull, yet no part of the brain properly 
so called, but intermediate between this and the spinal cord, upon 
the summit of which it stands. 



05 DUALITY IN UNITY. 

understanding and the affections, and their cooperative play 
in every action of the soul. The latter, as we have seen 
above, represent in turn the all-supporting wisdom and good- 
ness of God — the infinite, Divine essences which, expressed 
as life, conserve the universe. They fall, accordingly, under 
those two sublime, reciprocal principles of creation which in 
their most externalized physical embodiment we term Male 
and Female; and whose noblest presentation, or Man and 
Woman, are the lungs and the heart of the world. As man 
and woman, by reciprocity and cooperation, instrumentally 
keep the human race alive; so, by harmonious, conjugal 
action and re-action, the lungs and the heart instrumentally 
keep the human body alive. If either fail to perform its 
office, the other sinks powerless, and the fabric dies. Let 
the heart be as well-disposed to live as it may, unless its de- 
sires be recognized and responded to by the lungs, all is in 
vain; for though there is no life where there is no blood, 
there is no proper, life-sustaining blood where there is no 
air: conversely, the lungs are efficient for their part, as 
stewards of life, only in so far as the heart cooperates with 
them ; so grand and universal is the eternal fiat that nothing 
shall exist for itself alone, but only as -the husband or the 
wife of some other thing; that the unions of each pair shall 
be followed by the development and sustentation of some 
form or mode of life; that celibacy shall be infertility, and 
estrangement a gateway for death. Until the two organs 
are conjoined in complementary action, by the lungs drawing 
breath, the grand drama of existence, as we well know, does 
not commence. In the womb, life exists only in potency. 
Marriage is everywhere the real beginning; and there are 
no real beginnings without it.* 



* See the beautiful description of the marriage of the Heart and 
Lungs, in Swedenborg's "Animal Kingdom," i. 398. 



THE HEART AND THE LUNGS. 89 

46. It is not to be imagined that the heart and lungs do 
the whole work 'of life. Just as marriage, which has for its 
physical end the sustentation of the human race, requires 
for its effectuation a variety of subsidiary and contributive 
conditions, so the maintenance of the life of the body by 
the heart and lungs, which is a representative of marriage 
and its object, demands (intermediately through the nervous 
centres) the contributive functions of the stomach, the skin, 
the liver, and other organs. And more than this : if the 
action of any one of them become deranged, neither heart 
nor lungs can do their work for them ; just as with complex 
machinery, where, if a single wheel be thrown " out of 
gear," the coordination of actions is so interfered with that 
the whole apparatus comes to a stand. Every organ of the 
body is in league with every other organ. Every one of 
them has its own peculiar province and vocation, but is in 
treaty at the same moment, oifensive and defensive, with 
every other. Nothing is proper to any member in this 
unique and truly royal society that does not go forth in turn 
for the interest and advantage of that society. Local 
benefits immediately become public ones ; what injures in 
one part, is a calamity to the whole. " The cardinal life of 
every organ," says Swedenborg — " the excellency of its life 
over other organs — consists in the fact, that whatever it has 
of its own, still in a wider sense belongs to the community; 
and whatever afterwards results from the community to the 
organ, is the only individual property which the latter 
claims." It is not that the heart and lungs are all, but that 
life is preeminently effectuated through them ; the cessation 
of their activity, or of the activity of either of them, being 
also, as we shall see presently, the most usual and imminent 
cause of death. So far from any one organ, or set of organs, 
being autocratic, there is nothing in the whole scope of the 
natural history of the human body more wonderful than 



90 SYMPATHY OF ORGANS AND FUNCTIONS. 

the sympathy and concurrent energy of its various parts, 
unless it be the fine illustrative analogy afforded in the 
relations of the senses, as intimated to our daily conscious- 
ness. Not one of the senses can be exercised without sug- 
gesting to the miud acts and objects which belong to one or 
more of their colleagues ; and the highest pleasures we enjoy 
through their medium, are those which result from our being 
able to use some two or three of them at once. The water- 
fall, we love not only to see, but to hear ; and not only to 
hear, but to see; the eye helps the palate to the higher 
enjoyments of food, and the nose to be more gratified with 
the smell of flowers ; who ever looks on the smooth cheek 
of a little child, without seeking an enhanced pleasure in 
patting it ! True science is never science only. On the 
same principle commences all true investigation. To know 
any single and individual thing thoroughly, it needs that 
we gather instruction concerning it from all things. To 
learn the true nature of a primrose, we must inquire of firs 
and palm-trees, and every other plant that springs forth 
from the earth's bosom. From the same facts, brought to 
bear in yet another direction, may we learn how it is that 
undue iudulgence in any sensuality enslaves the whole being, 
and gradually chains a man's every thought and wish to 
the adopted habit of the sense given way to. 

47. In the fu.ll sense of the term, Respiration is a far 
grander performance than the mere inhalation of fresh air 
through the air-passages. Essentially, it is concurrent and 
coextensive with the circulation, so that its seat is the entire 
fabric. Numbers of animals have no lungs, commonly so 
called ; many have no special respiratory organs whatever. 
They breathe, nevertheless. Such, for example, are jelly- 
fishes, and the lowest forms of Crustacea. In these, respi- 
ration takes place through the medium of the skin. Not 
that this is a new arrangement for the purpose of breathing, 



PECULIARITIES OF BREATHING APPARATUS. 91 

now for the first time met with. Animals possessing a 
special apparatus, have cutaneous respiration ; man has it, 
in a slight degree. Here, however, it is only auxiliary ; 
whereas in the jelly-fishes it stands in lieu of the pulmonary 
kind, and the creature depends upon it alone. The mecha- 
nism of respiration in animals possessing lungs, is to be 
regarded merely as the highest development of a respiratory 
apparatus. It holds the first place because it is the mecha- 
nism by which the greatest quantity of oxygen can be taken 
into the system. There is no difference hi principle between 
the two kinds ; it is a difference simply of vigor and com- 
pleteness, the oxygen being admitted over an infinitely 
larger surface in lungs than when it has to make its way 
through the integuments. The position of the respiratory 
apparatus, which, like its form, is most curiously diversified 
in different creatures, is, generally speaking, regulated by 
the medium in which the animal is intended to live — on 
land, or in water. Terrestrial animals, breathing air in its 
gasiform condition, have internal breathing apparatus ; 
aquatic animals, collecting it from the water, have the 
apparatus in or near the surface. By virtue of these 
arrangements, neither class of animal can endure exchange 
of natural location. The bird and the mammal drown if 
submerged in water; the fish drowns if exposed to the 
atmosphere. This is, in the former case, because, water 
cannot furnish an adequate supply of atmospheric air ; in 
the latter, because the respiratory organs, from their external 
position, rapidly become dry by evaporation. Aquatic 
animals which have them partially covered, live longer out 
of water than those which have them exposed. The activity 
of life, in aquatic as well as in terrestrial animals, is univer- 
sally in the ratio of the development of their respiratory 
apparatus. The energetic habits of fishes, and the higher 
Crustacea, such as crabs and lobsters, correspond with the 



92 RESPIRATION AND ANIMAL HEAT. 

higher development of their breathing organs; the com- 
paratively sluggish life of the mollusca, the annelida, and 
the branchial amphibia, corresponds with the accompany- 
ing lower development. A creature possessing both pul- 
monary and cutaneous respiration, but able to live by 
cutaneous respiration only, if prevented from breathing 
through the lungs, sinks into the sluggishness and inactivity 
which characterize the animals it is then leveled with in 
regard to qualification for breathing.* 

48. By respiration, accordingly, in the complete idea of 
the process, and however efiectuated, whether by lungs or 
other apparatus, or cutaneously, oxygen is introduced to 
every part, and carbon removed from every part. The 
chemical process which goes on during the formation of the 
carbonic acid in which the carbon is carried away, is at- 
tended by the extrication of " animal heat." Here, then, 
are three purposes served : renovation of the blood, purifi- 
cation of it, and sustentation of temperature. Not that 
" animal heat," even as commonly so understood, comes 
exclusively of the combustion concurrent with respiration. 
The evolution of animal heat is largely dependent on the 
nervous energy. The lower the nervous energy of an ani- 
mal, the lower is its temperature ; the higher the nervous 
energy, the higher is its temperature. It is not the larger 
or smaller nervous system which is thus operative, but the 
higher or lower nervous energy. Dr. Carpenter, in his large 
work on Comparative Physiology, gives every kind of proof 
and illustration. Mr. Newport's papers on the Temperature 
and Respiration of Insects, published in the Philosophical 
Transactions for 1835 and 1837, may also be usefully con- 



* See for illustrations, an excellent paper on Respiration, by Dr. 
Sibson, in the Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical 
Association, vol. xvii., 1850. 



KESPIRATION AJSTD ANIMAL HEAT. 93 

suited. "Animal heat," in the popular use of the phrase, 
is not animal heat after all. What is so termed by the 
physiologists is as purely " mineral" heat as any that radi- 
ates from inanimate fire or candle. Animal heat, properly 
so called, is the zeal which urges the creature to the active 
exercise of its powers. There could not be a particle in the 
body of what is commonly but erroneously so designated, if 
the Divine Life did not already warm it with this, the true 
animal heat. That which the mere combustion of oxygen 
and carbon introduces is but supplementary and contingent. 
Under all phenomena lies a profounder cause than chemistry 
or anatomy can point out. The Divine Life everywhere 
takes the initiative ; the apparent causes are secondary, and 
are operative only as resting on it as a substratum. It 
should be noted, too, that the lower we descend in the scale 
of being, the more do these apparent, scientific causes seem 
disused. While, for instance, the higher animals have their 
blood propelled by the muscular engine we call the heart, 
in many of the lower kinds, and in plants, there is no such 
engine; the circulation goes on nevertheless. Besides the 
quasi-chemical use of the air in respiration, there is a use in 
the mechanical act of breathing it. There is no life where 
there is no motion, and there is no vital motion but where 
Air is passing to and fro, or indirectly actuating. The 
lungs are the first to move under its impulse; the heart 
beats time to them ; the brain falls as often as we inspire, 
and rises with every expiration. In a child under two years 
old, the latter may be felt as plainly as the pulse. Place 
your hand low down on the body, and there too is found 
constant and consentaneous movement with the lungs. 
Respiration, in a word, keeps everything on the move, and 
as soon as it ceases, comes the stagnation of death. 

49. Respiration does more yet than bring in oxygen and 
carry away carbon, and subserve the maintenance of vital 



94 THE ATMOSPHERE A SOURCE OF FOOD. 

warmth. It is itself a positive feeder of the body, with good 
aliment or with bad, according to the kind of atmosphere 
we inhale. The air is no mere compound of oxygen, nitro- 
gen, and carbon, as such. "It is a product elaborated from 
all the kingdoms of nature ; the seasons are its education ; it 
is passed through the fingers of every herb and tree. Who- 
ever looks upon it as one universal thiag, is like a dreamer 
playing with the words animal kingdom, vegetable kingdom, 
and so forth, and forgetting that each comprises many genera, 
innumerable species, and individuals many times innumera- 
ble. The air is a cellarage of aerial wines, the heaven of 
the spirits of the plants and flowers, which are safely kept 
there till called for by the lungs and skin. The assumption 
that the oxygen is the all, is ungrateful for the inhabitant 
of any land whose fields are fresh services of fragrance from 
county to county and from year to year." All the virtues 
of the ground and of vegetation are in the atmosphere by 
exhalation ; it is a kind of solution of some of everything 
that the world contains, and from it, as from a fountain, all 
come into the lungs and circulation. Not only does man 
live in the world, but the world, as to its essences, is con- 
tained within itself, literally as well as correspondentially. 
Thus is our assertion not a meaningless one, that all nature 
subsidizes and ministers to the blood. The ruins of the air, 
when chemistry has pulverized it, may be no more than 
what a brief formula of Roman letters will express ; but its 
influence on us, while unmolested, comes of a compositeness 
that no art can emulate. "Change of air" is something 
more to the sick man than change of oxygen, and on the 
other side of the picture are the dark, sad mysteries of air- 
conveyed infections, and the endless evils produced by con- 
fined, ill-ventilated abiding places. Dirty air is the source 
of incomparably greater evils than dirty water. Many 
complaints we are least apt to attribute to it, take their rise, 



THE ATMOSPHERE IN RELATION TO PLANTS. 95 

without doubt, in shut-up bed-rooms, and other domestic 
stagnant air-pools, the contents of which, were they but visi- 
ble, would fill us with horror and disgust. The body is not 
the only sufferer from impure air. Though vice and im- 
pure air may be found in company, virtue and foul air are 
incompatible. The temper of a public meeting is often in- 
fluenced by the condition of the air which it is breathing ; 
to talk of a "moral atmosphere" is not altogether a figure 
of speech. To the extreme and disgusting foulness of the 
air which they commonly breathe is, probably, to be re- 
ferred much of the indulgence of the poor in strong drink, 
especially ardent spirits. They take it as a necessity, 
claimed by nature as a kind of counterpoise to the ofiensive 
and pernicious actions of bad smells. The best temperance 
agent that can be got is a clean and well ventilated home. 
No training, however skilfully conducted, no dieting or tee- 
totalism, however rigid or prolonged, can bring a man into 
good condition, either of body or mind, so long as he is con- 
demned to breathe an impure atmosphere. Sanitary asso- 
ciations do well in teaching that the life is the blood, and 
that without pure air, healthy blood is but a name. 

50. The particular mode in which the air ministers to 
plant-life is found in the history of the growth or develop- 
ment of the vegetable structure. The great mass of the ve- 
getable fabric is derived, not from the soil, but from the air 
which bathes the leaves. The strictly " mineral" part of its 
food, as lime, silica, and potash, it undoubtedly sucks from 
the earth, whence the value of manures, and the difference 
produced by "good" and "bad" soils, but it is at the cost 
of the carbonic acid, water, and ammonia of the atmosphere, 
that it essentially lives, (p. 63.) Much, indeed, of what it 
proximately procures from under ground is virtually atmo- 
spheric, because previously carried thither by the rain. 
Thousands of plants have no connection whatever with the 



96 PLANTS UNCONNECTED WITH THE EARTH. 

earth, but grow upon the surface of other plants. Such are 
the beautiful aerial flowers called Orchidese, which in their 
wild state, live from first to last on the trees of their native 
forests, and demand an imitative location when brought 
into our hot houses and conservatories. They are not like 
the misletoe, parasites — thieves of the substance of the tree 
they perch upon, but simply " epiphytes " — bird-like lodgers 
among the branches. Dendrobium, Epidendrum, Dendroli- 
rion, are names ingeniously descriptive of their nature. Es- 
sentially, without doubt, they feed as terrestrial plants do — 
indebted largely to the various decaying organic matters 
which accumulate round about them, both of animal origin 
and vegetable. Lifted, however, as they are, so far above 
the surface of the earth, they show, in the most beautiful 
manner, how independently of direct connection with it ve- 
getable existence may be maintained, and how thoroughly 
at home it may be in the atmosphere. Two species of Or- 
chidese, called Air-plants, find in it their entire nourish- 
ment.* What epii)hytes are in the air, Algse are in the 
water, drawing from it their chief supplies ; for their roots, 
so called, are little more than organs of adhesion. Not 
wholly so, since many show a decided preference for certain 
kinds of rocks, and for the branches of certain other Algse, 
seated upon which, they attain higher perfection. Under 
the influence of light, the leaves, both of terrestrial and 
aerial plants, become the seats at once of respiration and as- 
similation. If leaves be not developed, as in the cactus, 
their place is supplied by th^ tender green skin of the gene- 
ral surface, which is then so modified as to perform the fo- 



* The trunks and branches of the trees in tropical Brazil, Mr. 
Gardner tells us, abound not only with OrchideEe, but with Bromelia- 
cese, Tillandsias, Ferns, and various climbing species of Begonia, all 
of course dependent upon the Atmosphere, 



PLANTS AND ANIMALS OF MUTUAL SERVICE. 97 

liar functions. Carbon, ammonia, and water are taken up, 
and oxygen is set free. Hence the leaves are well styled the 
"lungs" of plants; the lungs, for their part, being animal 
trees clothed with innumerable foliage. The leafless plants 
may be compared with the animals whose respiration is 
wholly cutaneous. To enable respiration to take place, the 
cuticle of every leaf is pierced with innumerable pores well 
called by the vegetable anatomist, stomates, since mouths 
they are, both in form and office. The most ordinary mi- 
croscope will bring them into view, and show a wonderfiil 
variety in their figure. 

51. Absorbing carbon, and liberating oxygen, which is the 
reverse of the animal process of respiration, plants are the 
great purifiers of the atmosphere as regards animals. The 
only exception to their use in this respect occurs in the 
fungi — plants which, unlike the purifying tribes, are never 
of a green color. What animal respiration exhales, vegeta- 
ble respiration consumes, and vice versa. There is, however, 
always some small amount of carbonic acid in the course of 
disengagement from plants, especially at night, when also 
they absorb oxygen. On this is founded the popular notion, 
so immensely exaggerated, that plants kept in a bed-room 
are injurious to the sleeper. Plants, by their assimilation, 
purify the air much more than by their respiration they 
vitiate it. They are breathers at once for their own interests, 
and for those of animals. Plants live by animals, and 
animals by plants. The girdling and encircling air, their 
common property, is that which truly makes the whole 
world kin. "The carbonic acid with which our breathing 
fills the air, to-morrow will be spreading north and south, 
and striving to make the tour of the world. The date trees 
that grow round the fountains of the Nile will drink it in by 
their leaves; the cedars of Lebanon will take of it to add 
to their stature; the cocoa-nuts of Tahiti will grow richer on 

9 E 



98 TREES AND PLANTS IN CEMETERIES. 

it; the lotus plants will change it into flowers. Contrari- 
wise, the oxygen we are taking in was distilled for us, some 
little time ago, by the magnolias of the Susquehanna, and 
the great trees that skirt the Orinoco and the Amazon. The 
rhododendrons of the Himalayahs contribute to it, the roses 
and myrtles of Cashmere, the cinnamon and the clove trees 
of the Spice islands." In recognizing this fine use of plants 
in the economy of the world, we must be careful not to over- 
estimate it. The primary use of plants is to supply food; the 
purification of the air is but a subordinate use. For every 
kindness they do to the lungs of animals there are a thousand 
done to their stomachs. 

52. In the fact that vegetation purifies the air by absorbing 
from it what is deleterious, resides a capital argument against 
intra-mural interments. There cannot be a doubt that the 
beautiful, time-honored, and world-wide practice of shelter- 
ing graves with trees, and adorning them with flowers, is 
attended by valuable sanitary results, such as are wholly 
precluded when burials are made amid streets and houses. 
While the sight of evergreen trees, and of flowers in their 
season, soothes and consoles the mind, by virtue of their 
associations and emblematic teachings, the atmosphere is 
improved and renovated. So true it is that whatever is 
practically wise is always in keeping with what is poetically 
beautiful, and an exemplification of it. Many of the trees 
which poetical intuition has pronounced appropriate to the 
side of the sepulchre, by reason of their evergreen or other 
symbolical characters, are precisely such as scientific design 
would approve. Witness the arbor-vitse, the Oriental cypress, 
and certain kinds of coniferse ; all of them more or less narrow 
and conical in form, neither covering a large space with 
their branches, nor casting too much shade when the sun 
shines, and freely admitting the air and light. The beauty 
of the cypress-planted cemeteries of the Turks is well known. 



■WAVING BOUGHS BETTER THAN MARBLE, 99 

At Constantinople the chief promenade for Europeans is the 
cemetery of Pera, delightfully placed on a hill-side, and 
abounding with this handsome tree. "At Scutari," Miss 
Pardoe tells us, " preferred by the Turks to all other burial- 
places, because of certain comfortable superstitions connected 
with it, a forest of the finest cypress extends over an im- 
mense space, clothing hill and valley, and seen far ofi* at 
sea, — an object at once striking and magnificent." In the 
cemetery appropriated to the Armenians, instead of the 
cypress, the Acacia is the prevailing tree. Marble is good, 
but waving boughs are better. It will be one of the most 
certain mdications of progress in real, practical science, 
when town burial-grounds shall be abolished for the sake of 
rural cemeteries like gardens. Wherever such have been 
formed, they have been regarded with satisfaction, and their 
general establishment would unquestionably lead to a 
marked diminution of average mortality, by removing a 
deadly evil. 



LofC. 



CHAPTER VI. 

MOTION TBJE UNIVJESSAL SIGN OF LIFE. 

53. Reviewing these various and wonderful processes, 
we cannot fail to observe how, in its every phase and expres- 
sion, the great sign and certificate of life is Motion. Use- 
fully, then, may we pause upon the consideration of it as a 
kind of summary and continent of vital phenomena. No- 
thing exists independently of motion as its cause ; by reason, 
likewise, of motion, all things hold together and preserve 
their form. "Passive life," sometimes sjDoken of, is a con- 
tradiction in terms ; certain states of being may be relatively 
passive, but there is no such thing as absolute passivity. In 
no case a state ipso facto, passivity is everywhere an incident 
of motion, consequently to be referred to motion, and to be 
explained by motion. Doubtless there is great diversity in 
the degree and amount of motion ; also in its manifestation 
to the eye. We must not confound it with moving about. 
Motion, ordinarily so called, implying visible change of 
place and position, and ■ furnishing us with ideas of time, 
does not comprise the All of motion. There is motion which 
no eye can perceive, motion which we are made aware of 
only by witnessing its results. Of this kind, indeed, is the 
chief part; the most wonderful and efiicient movements in 
the world are those which proceed in secrecy and silence.* 



* Kobert Boyle has an essay, well known to the curious, "On the 
great effects of Languid and Unheeded Motion." See in particular, 
chapters viii. and ix. 
100 



ANIMAL MOTION. 101 

The feebler and briefer the exhibition of motion, especially 
the latter, the lower is the expression of life ; the more ener- 
getic and continuous it is, the higher is the life — so that apart 
from structure, motion is a criterion of vital excellence, of 
course under the reservation that the quality of life depends 
primarily and essentially upon its End; else would the sea 
be more living than a plant; and a watch, or other piece of 
self-acting mechanism, commend itself as of nobler nature 
than many animals. Inanimate as it is, the watch, by rea- 
son of these relations, excites agreeable ideas of life, at least 
in the minds of the intelligent; while by the child and the 
savage, unacquainted with its construction, it is unhesita- 
tingly pronounced " alive !" Experience rectifies the error, 
but vindicates the principle upon which the mistaken judg- 
ment was entertained. 

54. Animals, as holding the highest offices in the economy 
of creation, therefore the noblest forms, and the highest 
degrees of life, present in their various history the completest 
examples of vital motion. Their movements are both in- 
ternal and external. The great internal movement is the 
circulation of the blood, and its familiar token, the beating 
of the heart. This is the circumstance on which the very 
name of Life is founded; its proximate root, the Anglo- 
Saxon lyhhan, "to live," being ultimately assignable to the 
Arabic luh, the heart, or the congenerous Hebrew name for 
that organ, leb. Literally, therefore, "life" means "the 
heart;" a fact beautifully in unison with the great funda- 
mental truth, alike of religion and philosophy, that Life is 
Love. It is for etymologists to determine how far the law 
of transposition of letters may or may not show "lub" and 
"life" in the Greek word (ftX-sa), "I love." The ancient 
Egyptians used a heart, placed in the midst of a censer of 
flame, for the hieroglyph of heaven, the source to the world, 
as the heart is to the body, of all activity and life. Nothing 
1) » 



102 MOTION IN PLANTS. 

is easier than to verify that the life of the body consists in 
its internal movements. How painful to sit perfectly still, 
even for a few minutes, as when having one's likeness taken 
by photograj)hy ! The performers in tableaux vivans and 
poses plastiques find that to play at statues is the hardest 
trial of human nature. Dependent on the circulation, and 
less admired only because of its deep privacy, is that won- 
derful and incessant flux of the ultimate atoms of the body 
which has been described above, and which led the genius 
of Cuvier to compare it to a whirlpool, an intense and un- 
ceasing stream, into which new matter is for ever flowing, 
and from which the old is as steadily moving out, 

55. External movement culminates in the grand preroga- 
tive of focomotion, the highest terrene presentation of the 
great omnipresent law of Attraction, — ^the law which, under 
the formula and name of chemical affinity, brings together 
the atoms of the pebble ; and which, at the other extreme 
of creation, under the formula and name of Love, impels all 
creatures towards what they have need of or desire. Where 
there is the greatest capacity for locomotion, there also is 
Ingenuity at its maximum. The animals which possess 
least of the constructive instinct are the slow-paced reptiles ; 
the expertest artisans in the world, are the birds and flying 
insects — man, of course, excepted, who has more capacity 
than either ; not, indeed, of the same nature, nor corporeal 
at all, but derived from the very instruments which prove 
his ingenuity also the highest, his railways and his ships. 

56. As in the animal kingdom, so in the vegetable. Plants, 
quiescent as they appear, depend for their existence on the 
motion of the juices contained within their substance; the 
force with which the sap flows onwards when the plant is in 
full vigor, is like the rush of a little river ; even in winter, 
when visible vitality is suspended, motion is still going on, 
though languidly; the process of development is never 



MOTION IN PLANTS. 103 

entirely arrested ; in the season of deepest torpidity, a slight 
enlargement of the buds, in preparation for the spring, is 
still to be observed. Were we endowed with eyesight ade- 
quately fine, and were the integuments and tissues of plants 
made transparent, we should see in every twig and leaf of 
every plant the most energetic and persevering activity ; as 
by means of a glass hive we may watch at our leisure the 
working of its indefatigable little townsfolk. One class of 
internal movements in plants does actually allow of obser- 
vation, just as in certain reptiles, as the frog, it is possible 
to observe the circulation of the blood-corpuscles. When a 
small portion of the cuticle of the Vallisneria is submitted 
to a sufficient magnifying power, in the interior of every one 
of its delicate cells there is seen a beautiful swimming pro- 
cession of little globules, round and round, sometimes faster, 
sometimes slower, till the vitality of the fragment is ex- 
hausted. A similar motion has been noticed in many other 
plants, terrestrial as well as aquatic, and probably it is 
general. Even the external movement of plants, induced 
by the excitation of the wind, notwithstanding its purely 
extraneous origin, is a highly important circumstance of 
their economy. It is evident that the boughs of trees are 
so arranged, and the leaves of plants in general so distributed 
and poised, as to admit of the swaying and fluttering which 
the wind promotes ; and that benefit results from such move- 
ment, corresponding, as it does, to the exercise of their limbs 
by animals, it seems unreasonable to doubt. How different 
the condition of the captives in our green-houses and conser- 
vatories, debarred from every opportunity of movement, 
compared with that of the glad, free trees, waving through- 
out the year in the breezes of the open country ! As exercise 
gives strength and solidity to the animal fabric, so do the 
vegetable denizens of the fields and hills wax sturdy through 
the agitation of their branches. When Homer would indicate 



104 MOTIONS OF INORGANIC NATURE. 

unusual strength and toughness in his heroes' spear-shafts, 
he calls them dve/zor/^e^y^c, " wuid-nurtured," or "wind- 
hardened." " Pine-trees," says the prince of arborists, " in 
thick woods, where the high winds have not free access to 
shake them, grow tall and slender, but not strong; while 
others, placed ia open fields, and frequently shaken by 
strong blasts, have not only thick and sturdy stems, but 
strike deep root, and raise beautifiil and spreading branches."* 
57. Astronomy, chemistry, meteorology, though their sub- 
jects belong to an entirely different province of being, find, 
like physiology, that all their phenomena commence in mo- 
tion. Not only has it been placed beyond a doubt that the 
group of worlds which includes our own is advancing 
through the heavens, but it has been determined in what 
direction it moves, and within certain limits, what is the 
velocity of its motion. If true of one system of sun and 
planets, it must be true of all. Every star that we espy is 
unquestionably rolling onwards, and carrying with it the 
spheres to which it is the local orb of day, the immeasurable 
altitude alone preventing the eye from pursuing; as when 
from the brow of a lofty cliff by the sea we discern far-dis- 
tant ships that we know by their spread canvas to be sailing, 
but which the extreme remoteness make appear to be at 
anchor. " If we imagine," says Humboldt, " as in a vision 
of the 'fancy, the acuteness of our senses j)reternaturally 
sharpened, even to the extreme limits of telescopic vision, 
and incidents which are separated by vast intervals of time, 
compressed into a day, or an hour, everj^hing like rest in 
special existence will forthwith disappear. We shall find 
the innumerable hosts of the fixed stars commoved in groujDs 
in different directions; nebulae drawing hither and thither, 



Evelyn. Sylva, Book 2d, chap. 8. 



MOTIONS OF INORGANIC NATURE. 105 

like cosmic clouds ; tte milky-way breaking up in particular 
parts, and its veil rent ; motion in every part of the vault 
of heaven." It is the motion of our OAvn little planet which 
chiefly adorns the sky with its varied splendors, as sunrise 
and sunset, and the shining and stately march of the con- 
stellations. Of the agitation of its enveloping atmosphere 
come the winds for health of body, and the magnificent sce- 
nery of cloud-land for delight of soul; the rain, the tem- 
pest, the Aurora, meteors, and those strange "fiery tears of 
the sky" which we term falling stars, announce over again 
that the realms of aerial sj)ace, all still and passive as they 
seem, are yet realms of uni"esting life. The very substance 
of the earth is ever-moving; the interior is incessantly in- 
ducing changes upon the exterior ; waves of motion are con- 
tinually passing through, indicated by the sinking of the 
land in some parts of the globe, and its rising in others, so 
that old beaches are left inland, and old high-water marks 
sunk far out at sea; hot springs, volcanoes, earthquakes, 
attest more vehemently still what agitation there is below. 
" Could Ave obtain daily news of the state of the whole of the 
earth's crust," continues the author of KosMOS, " we should 
in all probability become convinced that some point or other 
of its surface is constantly shaken." Yet all these greater 
movements of the earth's substance are but stupendous 
analogues of movements as incessantly going on among its 
elements — visible, acknowledged movements. What life is 
there in crystallization ! What energy in combustion ! What 
vivacity in effervescence! True, some of them are of brief 
duration, if we look only at a particular scene of their dis- 
play; but taking the total of the world, they are unremit- 
ting. Even in a given spot, they may be indefinitely pro- 
longed, like the ever-burning fire of the Vestal Virgins, pro- 
vided sufficient supply of their needful fuel be kept up. 
Animal movement itself could not be continued were sup- 



106 MOTION, A FIRST PRINCIPLE OP BEAUTY. 

plies of what it depends on to be withheld. Collectively, 
these movements express, as we have before styled it, the 
Life of inorganic nature. Under the impulse of the sustain- 
ing and influencing energy of the Creator, every atom of 
matter is full of moving life; the history of every particle 
is a history of change, and that of the world an ever-begin- 
ning, never-concluding metamorphosis. 

58. The moving of water is peculiarly like life. Hence the 
continual application to streams and fountains, by elegant 
minds, of the terms which pertain primarily to their own 
nature. The basins at the Crystal Palace, it is announced, 
are to be "alive with fountains and jets;" the river here, 
says the author of Coningsby,was "clear but for the dark sky 
it reflected, narrow and winding, hut full of life." Corinne's 
delight was in "the fount of Trevi, whose abundant cascade 
falls in the centre of Rome, and seems the life of that tran- 
quil scene." Virgil has flumine vivo, "in the living cur- 
rent;" Ovid, e vivis fontihus, "from the gushing fountains." 
Oersted devotes an entire chapter to the Life of the Fountain, 
a chapter as elegant in narrative as the principle arrived at 
is important. He shows us that while motion is the begin- 
ning of life, it is likewise the first principle of Beauty. 
" What a rich variety of inward activity we beheld," he 
concludes, "in that fountain! Were this to be separated 
from it, all besides would leave but a faint impression. That 
which is full of life arouses it in ourselves, and this feeling 
of life appertains to the complete enjoyment of beauty. An 
attempt to represent it in painting, if it were executed in a 
masterly manner, might in some degree please the eye; but 
the enjoyment which arises from the peculiar nature of the 
object would be much diminished, because motion, lustre, 
and the play of light can never be represented in a picture. 
I have several times seen pictures of fountains, but the im- 
pression they produced upon me was poor." To give in 



THE SEA AND THE CLOUDS. 107 

painting a sufficient idea of the ocean, to paint even rain or 
falling snow, is well known to be an equally fruitless effort, 
while nothing is easier than to sketch a still expanse of 
flooded fields, which, for the same reason, are unattractive 
and uninteresting, and incapable of exciting ideas of beauty. 
These, as so lucidly set forth by the accomplished Dane, we 
can realize only when movement is either present or forcibly 
implied, and thus only where the idea of life is secretly 
placed before the soul, which loves it, and hungers for it, 
and is depressed when there is none to be seen, because of 
its own innate, burning activity. How beautiful the waving 
of the trees, and the quiver of the leaves before the wind !* 
With what delight do we watch the gliding of the clouds 
across the sky, the heaving of the sea. 

The river rushing o'er its pebbled bed. 

Why are we never tired of looking upon the ocean? From 
land-scenery, however charming, after a while, the eye turns 
away, deliberately and content; the Sea, on the other hand, 
holds the whole soul in immortal fascination. The meadows 
and ferny lanes, even the woodland glades of perfect Spring, 
sheeted with the wild blue hyacinth, and sparkling with the 
crimson lychnis, even at that earlier sweet season, when the 
trees, though they have leaves upon them, give no shade to 
the chaste anemones, we can quit satisfied; but the beach, 
though it offer nothing but high-water mark of withered 
wrack, we never turn away from without reluctance. As in 
a glass we see our features reflected, so in the movement of 
the waves, and their sound, we recognize an image of our 



* How largely the movement of trees contributes to their pictu- 
resque, may be seen in Gilpin, who indicates more than once the 
fulness, as well as the nicety of his appreciation of its value. Forest 
Scenery, 



108 MOTION ANB REPOSE COMPLEMENTAEY. 

life. So with the movements, though silent, of the clouds, 
as, massively dark or softly brilliant, their swelling moun- 
tains change, unite, separate, and unite again, unveiling in- 
finite de]3ths of calm, sweet azure, or if it be sunset, fields 
of clear, burning brightness that seem to reach into heaven 
itself. Looking at the clouds merely as aqueducts, we miss 
the chief part of their beautiful ministry, which is to fill 
the sky with the idea of Life. Rhymesters and parlor na- 
turalists would have us believe the skies, to be perfectly 
beautiful, must be " cloudless." It is not only not true, but 
it would be contrary to the nature of things for it to be true. 
The skies even of Italy are not cloudless, except as in our 
own country, at certain periods, and derive their charm from 
their transparency rather than fr'om cloudlessness. Clouds 
are to the heavens what human beings are to the earth. 
They dwell in them, and move about them, various in their 
aspect and their missions as men and women ; and as of the 
latter come all the true dignity and grace of earth, so of 
the former comes every splendor that glorifies the sky. 

59. Things even which are incapable of visible motion 
mainly acquire what beauty they may present from in some 
way referring us to it. We are so pleased, for instance, 
with the undulating outline of distant hills, because they 
unroll before the imagination the rismg and falling of the 
waves, and thus transport us into the very presence of life's 
grandest emblem. There is no pleasure derived from the 
view of a mere flat extended plain, unless relieved by waving 
corn or the movement of animals. These being absent, 
everything seems, to have subsided into stagnancy, and the 
pictured idea is death rather than life. We call it, without 
a libel, " a dead level." Even the shadows in still water, 
depending, as they do, on the most exquisite placidity of sur- 
face, are no exception, for they seldom so powerfully appeal 
as when the objects they depict are gently agitated by the 



REPOSE IN REFERENCE TO ART. 109 

breeze. Feeling how important it is that life should thus 
be presented to the mind even in scenes of the profoundest 
repose, the poets rarely delineate such without introducing 
some delicate allusion that shall suggest it. 

Homines, volucresque ferasque 
Solverat alta quies : nullo cum murmure sepes 
Immotseque silent frondes ; silet humidus aer ; 
Sidera sola micant. — (Ovid, Met, vii. 185-188.) 

" Men, birds, and animals lie dissolved in deep repose ; the mur- 
mur of the woods is hushed ; the leaves are motionless ; the humid 
air is still ; the stars alone twinkle." 

Not that motion is sufficient to excite ideas of beauty; 
everywhere in nature there must be a combination of two 
separate ideas, complementary to each other, before we can 
realize satisfaction in the beholding; the second, in the pre- 
sent instance, being the idea of Repose, as we may easily 
perceive by considering the movements of animals, and 
more particularly, those of man. Swimming, flying, walk- 
ing, are graceful, and therefore pleasing, only when we 
gather from them ideas of Rest, such as are conveyed by 
that aspect of ease and security, resulting from a perfectly- 
felt balance, which characterizes them when unlaborious and 
unaffected. Attitudes, on the same principle, which com- 
mend themselves as peculiarly beautiful and graceful, 
though they seem to depend for their effect upon the exqui- 
site arrangement of the body and limbs, derive the half of 
it from their flowing, motion-hinting curves. 

60. Repose is needfiil not only to physical beauty; it be- 
longs as largely to the finest attitudes of the spiritual life, 
and is the state in which the imagination is most exquisitely 
unfolded. All true genius recognizes this. Shakspere would 
not let the players "tear a passion to tatters." He directs 
them, "in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, 

10 



110 REPOSE IN REFERENCE TO ART. 

whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a 
temperance that will give it smoothness." " The turmoil, 
the battle, the tumult of the Iliad is accompanied by the 
repose of studied measure. Amid the carnage of men we 
see the gods tranquil spectators, and when they are in the 
conflict, Achilles rests." So in Art. The same beautiful 
combination of action and repose in nature which reflects 
from the verses of the poet, is the foremost quality of the 
best efforts of the painter and the sculptor. The noblest 
and loveliest statues are those whose pure white marble is 
consecrated not more to life's emotions than to Repose. 



CHAPTER VII. 

61, The cessation of the vital activities is Death, which, 
though commonly spoken of as an actual existence, is simply 
another name for discontinuance. All forms recipient of 
life die some time. Some few may be privileged to survive 
the rest, even for thousands of years, as happens with certain 
trees, but the same death which in regard to the children of 
men, while it surprises many, skips not one, at last over- 
powers the most tenacious. "Come like shadows, so de- 
part," is the law of the entire material creation, in fact, as 
great a law as that it lives. For death is no accident of 
nature, neither is it in the least degree punitive. It is an 
essential and benevolent part of the very idea of material 
existence, bound up with the original scheme and method 
of creation as completely as gravitation is. Things die, not 
because they have been sentenced to, judicially, the sentence 
being effectuated, as often supposed, by a change superin- 
duced upon their original constitution ; but because without 
death, nature could not endure. Birth, growth, and arriving 
at maturity, as completely imply decay and death as the 
source of a river implies the termination of it, or as spring 
and summer imply corn-fields and reaping. Hence, what- 
ever the vigor and the powers of repair that may pertain to 
any given structure, whatever resistance it may offer to the 
shocks of Ages, Time, sooner or later, dissolves it; careful, 
however, to renew whatever it takes away, and to convert, 

111 



112 DEATH IN CONNECTION WITH THE FALL. 

invariably, every end into a new beginning. There is not a 
grave in the whole circuit of nature that is not at the same 
naoment a cradle. 

62. That death was brought into the world by Adam, we 
by no means intend to deny. Nothing is more true. Let 
us rightly understand, however, what kind of death it was. 
For death is no unitary thing; there are as many ways of 
dying as of living. Death commonly so called it certainly 
was not. Scripture, the supposed authority for the popular 
belief, rarely speaks of physical death. It uses the language 
of the material world, but intends spiritual ideas. Concern- 
ing itself primarily and essentially with the soul of man, 
what it has to say about his body is but casual. Only in 
purely biographical notices, as when it is said of Joseph that 
" he died an hundred and ten years old," and in some few 
such texts as " it is appointed unto all men once to die," is 
physical death ever alluded to, or even compatible with a 
just and practical interpretation. "In the day that thou 
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," was not a threat that 
corporeal death should be inflicted ; it signified that, break- 
ing the commandment, he who had it given him, should lose 
the high, lovely life which is union with God, and sink into 
irreligiousness, which is infelicity and disquiet. He died to 
the true life of the spirit the moment that he tasted; but as 
to his material body, he continued as he was before. "He 
begat sons and daughters, and lived nine hundred and thirty 
years." Equally unscriptural and groundless is the notion 
that physical death was even an appendix to the "punish- 
ment." Adam would have died had he never fallen, and so 
would all of his posterity, though none, perhaps, would have 
died of disease. Death probably would have resembled 
sinking into an easy and gentle slumber, such as overtakes 
us when agreeably fatigued ; it would have been that eutha- 
nasia to all men which Augustus Caesar used so passionately 



TESTIMONY OP GEOLOGY. 113 

to desire, and which is so beautifully predicated of the 
Christian in a well-known and lovely hymn : — 

So fades a summer cloud away, 

So sinks the gale, when storms are o'er, 

So gently shuts the eye of day. 

So dies a wave along the shore. 

If the Fall bore in any way on physical death, it was in 
leading to the sensualities which often hurry it on with pain ; 
and to the violations of the laws of peace and order which 
make so much of it unhappy and untimely. It is absolutely 
needful that man should die as to his material body, in 
order that he may rise into his eternal dwelling. He has 
faculties which cannot possibly be developed here, and which 
can only expand in heaven, or under purely spiritual con- 
ditions, so that it is only by dying that he can become truly 
himself. 

63. What Scripture really tells us, is that physical death 
was not brought into the world by Adam ; and the testimony 
of the insjDired volume is supported by the incontestable 
evidence of science. Geology proves that the world had 
been familiar with death for ages before mankind was placed 
upon it; every fossil in the museums of palseontology is a 
voucher that mortality and human sin neither had nor pos- 
sibly could have the least connection; to suppose otherwise, 
is to place the effect before the cause. It is a simple evasion 
to say, in order to reconcile the geological teaching, that it 
was only man who became subject to death through his 
moral defection; and that geology does not object to this 
doctrine. Geology knows but of a single law of life and 
death.* Assuming, however, that no geological discoveries 



* See for the arguments set forth by upholders of the notion here 
repudiated, the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy, vol. 4, p. 317. July, 
1852. 

10 * 



114 DEATH AND PROCREATION CONCURRENT. 

had ever been made ; assuming that no fossil shell or skele- 
ton had ever been dug up, and that the pre-Adamic condi- 
tion of the globe were still a secret ; the very history of the 
creation of animals and plants, in the gateway of the Bible, 
is sufficient to show that physical death is proper and con- 
genital to nature. The command given both to animals and 
man to "be fruitfiil and multiply," implies the removal of 
successive races by death ; otherwise the world would long 
since have been overstocked ; plants, for their part, are de- 
scribed as created "yielding seed," which carries with it the 
same inevitable consequence. The produce of so minute a 
creature as a fly would, if unchecked, soon darken the air, 
and render whole regions desolate; the number of seeds 
ripened by a single poppy, were they all to grow and be 
fruitfiil in their turn, would in a few years suffice to clothe 
a continent. Of course it is easy to object, as done by a 
certain class of reasoners, that this might have been cor- 
rected by a supplementary "miracle," but to evade fair 
philosophical deductions by inventing and ascribing miracles 
where none are spoken of and none are wanted, is as weak 
as it is irreverent. God does not perform his work so im- 
perfectly or short-sightedly as to be obliged to interpose with 
miracles to set it right; nor are we at liberty to speculate on 
the possibility of something supernatural in order to escape 
our difficulties, when to industry and patience nature itself 
is sufficient. Death, if not an absolutely necessary and 
inalienable counterpart to procreation, or being fruitful and 
multiplying; is at least a concomitant of every scene of pro- 
creation that the world contains, whether animal or vege- 
table: there is not the slightest reason to suppose that the 
animals and plants now existing are dissimilar to the first 
individuals of their respective species, but every reason to 
believe that they resemble in all points, and thus in the 
power of procreating their like: hence may we be assured 



CAUSES OP DEATH. 115 

that with the creation of organized beings came also the 
limitation of their life. Mankind could be no exception to 
the rule, as Eve was created before the Fall, and the nuptial 
benediction pronounced upon herself and consort. 

64. The supposition that physical death was introduced 
by human sin, requires our first parents to have been invul- 
nerable. No moral state, however exalted, could possibly 
exempt a race of organized beings such as man, however 
few in number, and though inhabiting the fairest and safest 
of material worlds, from the casual injuries of which organi- 
zation, from its very delicacy, is susceptible. The same fire 
by which Adam " unfallen," must be supposed able to have 
warmed himself, would have burned him had he approached 
too near. Had he fallen from a tree, he was in no less dan- 
ger of a broken limb than ourselves ; had he struck his foot 
against a stone, he would have been no less easily bruised 
or cut. From such injuries, he would probably have reco- 
vered with an ease and rapidity which our present viti- 
ated state of body debars us from conceiving, though faintly 
memorialized in the ready cure of the child and the tempe- 
rate man compared with the tedious and uncertain one of 
the drunkard ; but that he was not liable to them cannot 
for an instant be supposed, and if liable to them at all, of 
course he was susceptible of injuries terrible enough to kill. 
The more exquisite the capacity for life, always the readier is 
the liability to injury, as the eye, which holds the highest office 
in the empire of sense, is the organ most easily hurt and lost. 

65. Death has its proximate causes, and its remote causes. 
The remote causes are thousand-fold ; they are connected, 
directly and indirectly, with every solid and fluid in the 
body, and will only be determined, therefore, when patho- 
logy shall have become a perfect science. Every organ, 
and member, and tissue, is a possible threshold of death, 
and there is not one by which it may not enter unawares. 



116 CAUSES OF DEATH. 

Our life contains a thousand springs, 

And ends if one start wrong ; 
Strange that a harp of thousand strings 

Should keep in tune so long ! 

The proximate causes, on the other hand, are few, and 
easily understood, being resolvable into the negation of 
these grand fundamental processes of life which have been 
described in the preceding chapters. Reduced to their 
smallest denomination, we saw that the processes in question 
are the Assimilation of food, and the Respiration of atmo- 
spheric air. The former we found to have for its main ob- 
ject, the nourishment of the blood, the organ with which 
that fluid is pre-eminently identified being the heart Re- 
spiration we also found concerned with the blood, but iden- 
tified peculiarly with the lungs. To facts, accordingly, con- 
nected with one or other of these two organs, death, like life, 
is in all cases proximately referable. We die, proximately, 
either because the blood has lost energy and volume, or be- 
cause atmospheric air is insufiiciently admitted to it. Po- 
pularly regarded, death consists simply in loss of breath; 
and founded as the common idea is, upon external appear- 
ances, it is not improper thus to speak of it. It always has 
been, and always will be right to speak of things in our 
common converse as they appear to the senses. We should 
always seek to think with the philosopher — to understand 
what is the genuine truth — but in our ordinary intercourse 
with one another in daily life, it is proper and expedient to 
speak of things as they seem ; to say, for example, of the 
sun, that it " rises." So in the case of the dying. Here, to 
appearance, the breath only is concerned. The breath, ac- 
cordingly, do we alone take note of, and further, in truth, 
we need not look. Whatever terrible disease may be ra- 
vaging the frame ; whatever paralysis may hold the organs 
of sense and locomotion in deadly torpor — if there be 



" WHILE THERE IS BREATH, THERE IS LIFE." 117 

Breathing, we know that all is not over yet. " While there 
is life, there is hope," is only a paraphrase of — while there 
is breath, there is life. The primary cause of death may 
date from years before ; it may baffle all physicians and 
physiology to determine ; but in the final one there is no 
enigma. 

'Tis the cessation of breath ; 

Silent and motionless we lie, 

And no one knoweth more than this. 

I saw our little Gertrude die ; 

She left off breathing, and no more 

I smooth' d the pillow beneath her head. 

She was more beautiful than before. 

Like violets faded were her eyes. 

By this we knew she was dead. 

Through the open window looked the skies 

Into the chamber where she lay, 

And the wind was like the sound of wings. 

As if angels came to bear her away. 

Wedded to pictures and external shows of things, and 
inapt to rise from the merely symbolical representations to 
the holy presence of the thing signified, Pagan antiquity 
deemed that the breath was the very life itself. So per- 
suaded were they of the identity, that they even thought 
that by inhaling the last sighs of their dying friends, to 
suck the fleeting spirit into their own bodies. Many beauti- 
ful allusions to this occur in the poets: Anna, lamenting 
over Dido, exclaims as she expires, "And ah! let me catch 
it with my mouth, if there be yet any stray breath about 
her lips !" A collection of the references may be seen in 
Kirchman, who, in his little book, De Funerihus Romanorum, 
devotes a chapter to the superstitions this people connected 
with the breath of the dying. The elegy of Bion on Adonis 
contains one of such far higher beauty than any of the Roman 
poets afibrd, that it is surprising he makes no mention of it, 



118 THE BLOOD THE ESSENTIAL SEAT OF DEATH. 

" Eouse thee a little, Adonis, and again this last time kiss me ! 
Kiss me just so far as there is life in thy kiss ; till from thy heart 
thy spirit shall have ebbed into my lips and my soul, and I shall 
have drained thy sweet love-potion, and drunk out thy love ; and 
I will treasure this kiss, even as it were Adonis himself." 

66. While legitimate to speak of death as "ceasing to 
breathe," we must remember, therefore, that breathlessness 
is only a part of the idea of death. Ordinarily the circula- 
tion goes on a little longer, requiring, if death is to be affi- 
liated on a single event, that it be referred to the heart 
rather than to the lungs. Slowly and sadly does the blood 
consent to death ; like the tenderness of woman, its ministra- 
tion is first and last in the history of life; that which was 
our safety, and stronghold, and delight in our noon-day 
vigor, in our sunset is still sedulous and faithful. 

O my love ! my wife ! 
Death, that hath svick'd the honey of thy breath, 
Upon thy beauty yet hath had no power : 
Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet 
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, 
And death's pale flag is not advanced there. 

Both ideas are right in their own province and connection. 
It is true that the heart is the last to die ; it is true that the 
ceasing to breathe is death. The question to be answered is 
simply, how is death most truly signified, and in what for- 
mula of Avords is it most accurately described. Here, we 
have already seen, there is no mystery. That which in 
death arrests the attention of the bystander, and tells only 
too surely that all anxieties and cares are over, is the ex- 
ternal, visible circumstance, the ceasing to breathe, not the 
invisible, secret circumstance of the blood ceasing to move; 
and thus, though the latter may be last in point of time, 
the former is death ostensibly ; and this is sufficient to vin- 
dicate the expressions summed up in "the breath of life," 
the synonym in all ages of vitality. A true idea of the 



CHOLERA. 119 

cause of death will of course include both circumstances ; 
whichever occurs first, the other is sure to follow almost im- 
mediately, just as they are themselves inevitably brought 
on, though less rapidly and directly, by the stoppage of any 
other of the vital functions. 

67. Essentially, then, death is the devitalizing and disor- 
ganizing of the Blood. We showed, when speaking of food, 
that it is from the blood that every tissue and organ of the 
body is constructed and repaired ; and that as these are con- 
tinually wasting away, there is a proportionate demand 
made upon the fountain from which alone they are renew- 
able. It is obvious that if the needful supply of food for 
the blood be withheld, the blood itself must diminish and 
lose in virtue. It becomes too much reduced to circulate 
vigorously, and to meet the demands of the wasted tissues, 
and the body gradually withers away. This is most obvi- 
ously shown in the lingering and miserable death induced 
by starvation. Bvit it is common also as the result of cer- 
tain diseases, which prevent the digestive organs from assi- 
milating a sufficient amount of food to maintain the required 
quantity and quality of the vital fluid. To deficiencies of 
this nature may be referred an endless variety of morbid 
afiections, one disease springing from another, as sickness 
from drinking of poisoned Avells. So with death proximately 
connected with the oxygenation of the blood. If the natural 
power of breathing be so affected, whether by disease of the 
respiratory organs, or by mechanical hindrance, as to pre- 
vent the inspiration of air in sufficient quantity to supply 
the needful oxygen, the balance of action between the heart 
and lungs is upset, and death ensues as surely as in 
the former case. In cholera, according to one theory of 
this direful malady, although the blood circulates freely, 
and the patient breathes as in health ; from some unknown 
cause connected with the nervous system, the blood fails to 



120 THE NERVOUS SYSTEM IN CONNECTION WITH DEATH. 

become aerated. The discoloration of the body is attributed 
to its super-carbonized condition'.* Not without reason then, 
has the blood always been famous, and regarded as the very 
seat of Hfe. Blood and the life have in all ages been con- 
vertible terms, and justly. In Hades, says Homer, "the 
shades can neither speak, nor recognize the living, except 
they first drink blood." But it does not appear ever to 
have been used as a name for Ufe. This has been the prero- 
gative of the Air, just as the human race, though born of 
woman, and nourished by her, is proudly called Man. The 
only approach to such use is in such phrases as to " shed 
blood," meaning to kill; and calling death by the name of 
"the sword." An oath with the ancient Scythians was "by 
wind and sword," meaning " by life and death." The dignity 
which has in all ages been connected with Red, as a color, 
probably owes its ascription, in part at least, to the sanctity 
of that of which blood is the chief sign and emblem. 

68. Violent deaths similarly come either of arrested cir- 
culation, as in the case of bleeding to death, and death by 
lightning; or of arrested respii'ation, as in strangulation, 
stifling, and suffocation by drowning, or by inhaling noxious 
vapors, such as the fumes of charcoal. A violent blow on 
the head, affecting the brain ; or upon the stomach, affecting 
the ganglionic centres, although unattended by fracture, 
kills by the shock to the nervous system, which is instanta- 
neously followed by stoppage both of the circulation and 
the breathing. Both of these great functions of course 
require that the nervous system shall be in good order, and 



* Cholera, say others, appears to kill by separating the serum and 
the crassamentum of the blood. The former runs off by the bowels ; 
the latter clogs the minute vessels, and causes the discoloration. 
Assuming this to be the true theory, it is a no less beautiful illustra- 
tion that death is induced by the rupture of a complementary 
dualism. 



PROXIMATE CAUSES OF DEATH. 



121 



thus, in tracing deatli to its profounder causes, we find that 
we cannot stop till in the presence of that mighty sphynx, 
the Brain, the fountain of nervous energy to the whole 
body. What the lungs and heart are to the blood, the 
lungs and brain are to the nervous fluid, which circulates 
through the nerves as the blood does through the veins, 
coexistent and coextensive with it. Any irregularity in the 
stream, however it may be caused, is attended of course by 
analogous evils to the system. Denied by some, the exist- 
ence of this fluid admits nevertheless of demonstration, both 
from analogy, and by inductions founded on experience. It 
exists and acts according to laws similar to those which 
regulate the existence and action of the blood, of which it 
may be regarded as a higher and more exquisite species. 

The following table of the proximate causes of death is 
kindly furnished me by my friend. Dr. Henry Browne, of 
the Manchester Royal School of Medicine. It will be seen 
that he at once recognizes the great division that has been 
adverted to ; and in the spirit of true philosophy, reconciles 
what in different authors appear to be conflicting views, 
though essentially the same. 



By BicHAT 

to the 

Heart — 



Death is traced - 




LUNGS- 



By Watson 

to 

— Ansemia- 

(Bloodlessness) 

'Asthenia'' 

{Strengtldessness) 



Coma^ 

(Sensdessnessy 

-Apncea- 



By Alison 

to the 
• Heart. 



(Breathless'ness} 



-Lungs.f 



* The terra asphyxia is often misapplied to breathlessness. Pro- 
perly, it denotes nothing more than the cessation of the pulse, cr<pv^is. 
f See on the proximate causes of death, and its phenomena, as 
11 p 



122 TENACITY OP LIFE IN THE LOWER ANIMALS. 

69. Among the inferior animals death is referable to 
analogous, if not identical hindrances to the due perform- 
ance of the vital functions. Deprivation of food and air, 
violent shocks to the nervous system, especially where a 
brain is present, exposure to severe cold, are among the 
more frequent causes; one circumstance or another being 
more quickly and imminently fatal, according to the 
idiosyncracy of the species. As we travel towards the 
outermost circles of animal life, conditions which would 
speedily destroy a human being, a quadruped, or a bird, are 
borne, however, with astonishing indifference. It has often 
been observed of desperately wounded soldiers, who have 
nevertheless recovered, that while in most cases nothing is so 
soon destroyed as human life, in others there is nothing 
harder to dislodge. Applied to many of the smaller races 
of the animal world this almost becomes a rule. To say 
nothing of those extraordinary animalcules which, accord- 
ing to the experiments of Spallanzani,* may be dried into 
mummies, kept indefinitely in that state, and then revived ; 
creatures even so large as insectsf are in many cases nearly 
proof against the ordinary agents of vital overthrow- 
Several extraordinary instances of this may be read in that 
amusing work "Episodes of Insect Life," vol. ii., pp. 162- 



above briefly set forth, the excellent Outlines of Physiology and 
Pathology of Dr. Alison. Edinburgh, 1833. 

* Tracts upon the Nature of Animals, vol. 1, p. xxxvi., &c. 

f Insects are commonly cited to express ideas of smaUness. But 
to innumerable creatures they are what whales and elephants are to 
ourselves. The animal which holds the middle place in the scale 
of size, reckoning fi'om the Monas crepusculutn, the minutest to which 
our microscopes have yet reached, is the common house-fly. That 
is, there are as many degrees of size between the house-fly and the 
Monas, reckoning downwards, as, reckoning upwards, there are be- 
tween the house-fly and the whale. 



CAUSES OF DEATH IN PLANTS. 123 

167, &c. It is worthy of note that these latter creatures, 
like reptiles, can better endure intense heat than intense cold, 
of which they always stand in dread. Tenacity of life is 
wonderfully exhibited also in the tortoise family, and in 
toads, which appear to be capable of living in a state of 
torpidity for very considerable periods. The stories how- 
ever, so common in newspapers, of their leaping out of 
stones when suddenly broken in two, and out of timber 
when being sawn, seem to be none of them sufficiently 
authenticated. Many naturalists positively deny that it ever 
occurs. Experiments made by Dr. Buckland led him to 
the conclusion that when totally secluded from the access 
of atmospheric air, these creatures cannot live a year, and 
that they cannot survive beyond two years if qptirely pre- 
vented from obtaining food. 

70. Death purely from old age, whether in man or the 
inferior animals, is of course not to be confounded with such 
as comes of accident or disease. Here it is induced by the 
gradual closing up of delicate vessels; the hardening and 
ossification of tissues ; the languid and imperfect action of 
important organs. These changes promote others; by and 
bye some principal part becomes affected, and lastly, where 
present, the great dualism of heart and lungs. No creature 
can exist without these changes taking place in it, and 
superinducing, sooner or later, senility and dissolution. 
Agerasia belongs only to the soul ; this alone lives in per- 
petuity of youth. 

71. In the Vegetable Kingdom, as in the Animal, death 
is the stoppage of the process which maintains life. Starva- 
tion, drought, exposure to intense frost, or to an atmosphere 
infected with acids and other obnoxious chimney-products, 
will arrest the functions of plant-life as effectually as the 
opposite conditions encourage them. Plants suffer the more 
sorely from such influences through their inability to move 



124 DEATH IN THE INORGANIC WORLD. 

away from the place of danger. To compensate this, they 
are endowed with a tenacity of life far exceeding that of 
animals, or at least, of animals of equal rank. The stricken 
quadruped falls never to rise again ; the stricken plant buds 
anew in calm endurance. "There is hope of a tree, if it be 
cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender 
branch of it will not cease. Though the root thereof wax 
old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; — 
yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth 
boughs like a plant." 

72. In the mineral world, death is simply Decomposition. 
All bodies resolve into their elements at the time of death ; 
but whereas in plants and animals this occurs only as the 
result and, supplement of death, in minerals death and de- 
composition are the same. Life, we must remember, is 
expressed in the mineral simply as chemical affinity; — no 
functions take place in it ; death accordingly, consists simply 
in the setting aside of that affinity. Some stronger affinity 
coming into operation from without, one or more of the 
constituent elements is drawn away, and the substance ceases 
to exist. No mere melting, or crushing, or pulverizing, or 
modelling by the hands of Art, affects the life of a mineral. 
Though a piece of marble be ground into impalpable 
powder, the atoms are living marble still ; every fragment is 
still animated by the life which holds together its component 
lime and carbonic acid; the minutest particle as completely 
represents and embodies the nature of the original mass as 
a drop of spray from the advancing wave does that of the 
sea. Such at least is it to the eye of the chemist. To the 
unversed in his magical science, demolition is annihilation, 
and in a limited sense, it is not erroneous thus to regard it. 
Put side by side, the compact and solid stone naturally 
speaks more of life than the mere heap of scattering dust; 
the one preserves the chiselled writing of forty centuries, the 



EUSKIN ON INORGANIC LIFE. 125 

other disappears with the first curl of wind. Hence it is 
that in Scripture, dust is the common name for what is 
unvitalized or dead; while Stone or Rock, which give the 
highest possible idea of solidity and permanence, characters 
the very opposite to those of dust, are the equally common 
appellations of the Fountain of Life. Mr. Euskin explains 
these beautiful metaphors on the principle that with consoli- 
dation we naturally connect the idea of purity, and with 
disintegration that of foulness. "The purity of the rock," 
says he, "contrasted Vv^ith the foulness of dust or mould, is 
expressed by the epithet ' living,' very singularly given to the 
rock in almost all languages." Doubtless there is a truth in 
this, for life and purity, both in the physical and the moral 
world, are correlative, but as Mr. Ruskin himself acknow- 
ledges in the next sentence, the deeper reason is the coherence 
of the particles in the stone, and their utter disunion in the 
case of the dust. The page is well worth turning to, not 
merely for the philosophic views on the general subject of 
inorganic life, but for the admirable commentary on the text 
that "pureness is made to us so desirable because expressive 
of the constant presence and energizing action of the Deity 
in matter, through which all things live, and move, and have 
their being; and that foulness is painful as the accompani- 
ment of disorder and decay, and always indicative of the 
withdrawal of Divine support."* Neither consolidation nor 
purity are at all times intended in this remarkable epithet. 
In Virgil, for example: — 

Fronte sub adversa scopulis pendentibus antrum ; 

Intus aquse dulces, vivoque sedilia saxo. 

Nympharum domus. — {jEneid i. 16-18.) 
" Opposite is a cave, the retreat of the wood-nymphs, formed by 
over-hanging rocks ; inside are limpid waters, and seats of living 
stone." 

* Modern Painters, vol. ii., pp. 73-76. 



126 THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS. 

What then shall be the meaning here ? At first sight there 
is none. But when we bethink ourselves that the cool, hu- 
mid atmosphere of such sweet natural summer-houses and 
grottoes as the poet describes, causes every surface upon 
which the light can fall to clothe itself with green and most 
delicate moss, in an instant the words become animated and 
picturesque, we hear the trickling waters, and feel ourselves 
sheltering from the fervid noonday sun, each great stone a 
living cushion for our repose. The characteristic of true 
poetry is, that by single words thus artlessly introduced, it 
awakens all the most beautiful memories and associations 
of the heart. 

73. Hitherto we have spoken of inorganic compounds. 
The life of the simple substances, the fifty or sixty primitive 
elements, or as-yet-undecompounded bodies, is much less 
precarious. When, under chemical agency, a compound is 
broken up, though the mass ceases to be, the constituents 
are in no wise aifected. As in the crowding together of a 
multitude of men for some great social or political object, 
though it is the assemblage which attracts our attention, 
every member of it has an interior, unnoticed life of his 
own, so is it with the several elements which in combination 
form the acid or the salt. The compound has one life, the 
elements have another ; and as the individuals which com- 
pose the meeting live on, though the meeting itself dissolves 
and dies with the conclusion of the business that brought it 
together, so do the simple elements of destroyed compounds ; 
they separate, not to perish, but to enter upon new activi- 
ties. Though several even of the most solid of the simple 
substances may, under the influence of heat, be volatilized 
and altogether dissipated, zinc and potassium for instance 
among the metals, no one can say that any one of these 
substances is destructible absolutely. No one can assert that 
like iodine vaporized and condensed in a Florence flask, or 



THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS. 127 

like camphor in a glass jar (wliich evaporates only to de- 
scend again in glittering frost-work), they do not consolidate 
afresh. That they would do so we should certainly expect, 
though it is quite as likely that when so attenuated, new 
changes and decompositions come into process, causing them 
to return to the eyes of men in the form of some other " pri- 
mitive element ;" for, as we saw in our second chapter, it is 
not only possible, but extremely probable, that all the so- 
called primitive elements are but different presentations of 
two fundamental ones, their respective atoms being variously 
associated, and giving us oxygen, gold, silex, &c., in turn, 
according to the nature of the union. For anything we can 
tell, the identical oxygen, gold, silex, &c., of the primaeval 
world, are still in being, though in the course of ages they 
may have undergone innumerable vicissitudes. For aught 
we know, on the other hand, the primaeval gold, silver, &c., 
may in great measure have perished, and as many repro- 
ductions have occurred in the secret but mighty laboratory 
of inorganic nature, as there have been procreations of 
plants and animals in its organic realm. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE r Am OTIS T^EASES OF JOIFE. 

74. Though death is the universal end, nothing is more 
curiously varied than the Lease of existence. The present 
chapter will be devoted to the consideration of what is cer- 
tainly one of the most interesting mysteries in the economy 
of life — the question, why do things live for determinate 
periods ? We do not mean, why do certain individuals die 
earlier than others of their kind, as when infants and young 
people are removed by death ; but why does the ordinary 
maximum of age vary so immensely in regard to the differ- 
ent species of things ; why do some come to maturity and 
perish in less than a year, while others endure for three, 
four, ten, twenty, a hundred, even for thousands of years ? 
For that the duration of the different species of animals 
and plants is thus determinate, is certain ; every one of them 
has a lease of life peculiar to itself, though true that in the 
greater part the exact term remains yet to be ascertained. 
Did we know the minute history of horse and lion, thrush 
and pelican, antelope and red-breast; were we intimately 
acquainted with the natural constitution of each brute and 
bird, the duration of the different species of the organized 
creation would unquestionably allow of being tabulated as 
exactly as the daily rising and setting of the sun. We 
might anticipate such a fixity of duration from the deter- 
minate character of everything else which concerns living 
beings. Every species of animal and plant has its deter- 

128 



FIXED LEASES OF LIFE UNIVERSAL. 129 

minate form, size, and organization ; the period of gestation, 
though it diifers widely in the aggregate of the animal king- 
dom, is invariably the same in the same species ; similarly, 
the growing of seeds, which is vegetable incubation, and the 
period of the flowering of plants, are in any given species 
uniformly the same ; it is but reasonable then to expect that 
there are definite leases of existence, and observation proves 
the opinion to be well-founded. Under hostile conditions, 
the allotted periods of duration may doubtless be greatly 
shortened, as experience shows us every day, while under 
favorable ones they may sometimes be surprisingly extended. 
As in the human species, mortality cuts down myriads before 
puberty, while now and then we are called to wonder at an 
Old Parr, so in all other tribes of being, though the unusual 
longevity is perhaps never so great in proportion. Making 
all allowance for such exceptions, and giving everything fair 
judgment, it still comes true that there is a fixed lease which 
the mass of the healthy individuals of the species attain, 
and beyond which the life of the mass is seldom prolonged. 
Whether all or any living things at present reach, even in 
exceptional cases, the full term of life originally allotted to 
their race, it is impossible to know — the probability would 
seem that few, perhaps none, reach their intended maximum, 
except an individual here and there. That individuals do 
sometimes prodigiously outlive their generation, certainly 
does not seem explicable on any supposition but that in the 
longsevals the native capacity is fully realized. We ought 
perhaps to consider enormous ages less as exceptions to the 
rule than as revelations of the lease with which the species 
is potentially gifted by the Almighty. Thus, if a certain 
percentage of mankind live to a hundred and fifty, and a 
certain percentage of horses to sixty, are not these ages to 
be esteemed the terms respectively prescribed in the begin- 
ning ? Very little is yet known with certainty as to the 

F » 



130 WIDELY VARYING LEASES OF LIFE. 

periods of life ordinarily attained. Beyond some broad, 
general peculiarities in the larger classes of living things, 
and tolerably correct statistics respecting the animals man 
is most familiar with, and the shortest and longest lived 
plants, scarcely anything precise has yet been arrived at. 
The literature of natural history is almost barren upon the 
subject ; physiologists generally dismiss it in a paragraph. 
Buffon is the most copious in detached observations; the 
best summary, brief though it be, is contained perhaps in 
the admirable and celebrated little treatise of Hufeland.* 
The recently published work of the eminent Parisian savant 
FlourenSjf to which attention has been so largely attracted 
in intelligent circles, sets forth a, masterly doctrine on the 
relation between the period of attaining maturity and the 
duration of life, amending the well-known theory of Buffon, 
and placing it on a sound j)hysiological basis ; but in other 
respects it has little really new. The whole subject is thus 
in its infancy. The profounder and more interesting ques- 
tion, or part of the question, namely, ivhy the divine lease 
of life varies so widely; why, for example, the rabbit is 
ordained to live for only eight years, while the dog is al- 
lowed to run on to twenty-four ; why the wheat-j)lant fruits 
and dies in a few months, while the cedar is appointed to 
watch the lapse of centuries ; this appears wholly untouched, 
probably from its involving a spiritual idea, usually the last 
to be considered, though the first in importance and illu- 
minating power. That there is a reason for the various 
duration of life, we may be sure ; there can be nothing acci- 



* The Art of Prolonging Life, excellently edited, in one volume, 
by Erasmus Wilson, 1853. 

f On Human Longevity, and the amount of Life upon the Globe. 
From the French, by Charles Martel, 1855. 



NO LEASES Iisr THE MINERAL KINGDOM. 131 

dental or capricious about it ; what that reason may be, is a 
magnificent problem for Christian philosophy. 

75. The question applies of course only to organized 
beings, at least in its fulness. In minerals, for reasons 
already amply stated, duration is altogether irregular and 
indeterminate. Ruled wholly by contingencies, no scale of 
existence can be drawn up with regard either to simple or 
to compound bodies. It cannot be said that the diamond 
averages so many years; gold so many more; flint so many 
less. The same with any composite substance, as a lump of 
marble, or a mass of common salt; it lives as long as it is 
not assailed by the particular chemical agencies which would 
decompose it, and which nothing in the substance itself can 
repel : it is liable to them from the first moment of its exist- 
ence, and may thus be extinguished in an hour, or enjoy a 
kind of immortality, conditional on its seclusion from 
them. How vast the antiquity of many a little pebble, yet 
how slender the tenure of its existence, which a few drops 
of acid would overthrow in as few minutes! It is to be 
observed, however, that, as if in prefiguration of the higher 
kingdoms of nature — a beautiful subject, hereafter to be 
illustrated at length — in the more exquisite and delicate 
developments of the mineral world, or crystals, there are 
species that actually seem subject to a kind of natural and 
organic dissolution. After arriving at what may be esteemed 
a kind of maturity, certain crystals decompose, (of course 
under the influence of new conditions at variance with those 
under which they were formed,) and decaying, give curious 
skeletons of what they were in the bloom of their existence. 
Such relics are found in mines, often with crystals of difierent 
composition forming amid the ruins of the extinct one, just 
as on the shoulders of an ancient oak we may sometimes see 
sapling trees of other species, the products of seeds carried 
thither by some bird or wafting wind, and which have fat- 



132 LEASE OF LIFE IN PLANTS. 

tened on its decaying heart. Vary the text-word to suit the 
especial theme, and there is no part of creation to which 
those fine philosophic verses of Pope's will not apply : — 

See dying vegetables life sustain, 

And life dissolving, vegetate again ; 

All forms that perish, other forms supply ; 

By turns we catch the vital breath, and die. 

There is no essential difference between the violent death of 
the crystal in the laboratory of the chemist, and the quasi- 
natural in the mine; only in the latter the idea of deter- 
minate duration seems first to reveal itself 

76. To obtain clear and comprehensive ideas respecting 
the duration of life, it is requisite that a tolerable acquaint- 
ance should be formed with the particular circumstances 
and phenomena of vital action, also with a fair number of 
the species of things. No true advance can be made in any 
department of the philosophy of nature while we rest in 
such generalities as beasts, birds, and fishes ; we must learn 
species minutely and accurately, watching them from season 
to season, and from year to year, and penetrating, as far as 
possible, into their anatomy. None are better for this pur- 
pose, or so good, as our own common native plants, and 
wild animals, winged and wingless, with which we can so 
readily become familiar, and ignorant of which no one can 
pretend to the name of naturalist. With such knowledge 
in hand, the further steps can be taken pleasantly and 
safely, but not before. We shall consider, primarily, the 
phenomena connected with the duration of life in the Vege- 
table Kingdom, seeing that this is essentially the outline and 
prefigurement of the Animal, and thus the natural starting- 
point of all high physiological inquiry. 

77. No one has entered Nature through its "gate Beauti- 
ful," the world of plants, without soon discovering that the 



LONGEVITY OF TREES. 133 

duration of life is here of three general denominations. 
Some species are annual, or rather semi-annual, living from 
spring only to the close of the autumn of the same year ; 
others are biennial, living to the close of the second autumn, 
but never beyond it ; the greater part are perennial, or com- 
petent to live for a long series of years. Annuals include 
many of the commoner garden flowers and culinary vege- 
tables, as marigolds and lupines, peas and beans, which re- 
quire accordingly to be freshly raised from seed every season : 
biennials are likewise common in gardens: perennials com- 
prise all those plants which form the staple vegetation of 
a country, withering to a certain extent in the winter, and 
even dying down to the roots, but sprouting afresh with the 
return of spring; also the countless varieties of trees and 
shrubs, whether deciduous or ever-green. The perennials 
exhibit as great diversity in lease of life as the different 
species of animals. Some decay in as few as four or five 
years; others, often remarkable for their odoriferous and 
balsamic qualities, as sage, balm, and lavender, endure for 
ten or more; next come the larger and robuster kinds of 
shrubs, as rhododendrons and azaleas ; then such trees as are 
of rapid growth, and the substance of which is soft, as the 
poplar and willow; and lastly, those mighty, slow-growing, 
solid-wooded pillars of the forest, as the cedar and oak, at 
whose feet whole nations rise and fall.* 

" Non hiemes illam, non flabra, neque imbres 
Convellunt ; immota manet, multosque per annos 
Multa virum volvens durando secula vincit !" 



* There are olive-trees in the supposed garden of Gethsemane 
which have been estimated at two thousand years ; but these are 
probably mere descendants of those which are connected with the 
narratives of the Gospels, put forth originally as suckers from their 
roots, and thus to be regarded rather as restorations than as iden- 
tically the same. 
12 



134 DATA FOR ASCERTAINING AGES. 

How vast are the periods of life allotted to the longseval 
trees may be judged from the following list of ages known 
to have been reached by patriarchs of the respective 
kinds : — 

Cercis , 300 years. Walnut 900 years. 

Elm 335 " Oriental Plane... 1000 " 

Ivy 450 " Lime 1100 " 

Maple 516 " . Spruce 1200 " 

Larch 576 " Oak 1500 " 

Orange 830 " Cedar 2000 " 

Cypress 800 " Schubertia 3000 " 

Olive 800t " Yew 3200 " 

Four and five thousand years are assigned to the Taxodium 
and the Adansonia, and Von Martins describes Locust-trees 
in the South American forests which he believes to have 
begun their quasi-immortality in the days of Homer. 
Whether or no, it may safely be asserted that the world 
possesses at this moment living memorials of antiquity at 
least as old as the most ancient monuments of human art. 
How grand and solemn is even the thought of a tree coeval 
with the pyramids of Egypt and the sculptures of Nineveh, 
yet still putting forth leaves, and inviting the birds to come 
and "sing among the branches!" Well might the old 
preacher of Alexandria discern in a tree the terrestrial 
image of heavenly truth. 

78. The way in which the ages of these vegetable Nestors 
have been ascertained leaves no doubt of their correctness. 
In some few cases the data have been furnished by historical 
records, and by tradition; but the botanical archaeologist 
has a resource independent of either, and when carefully 
used, infallible. The whole subject of the signs and testi- 
monies of particular age is interesting, and deserves to be 
here dealt with, but unfortunately scarcely anything is yet 
knoAvn about it. The deficiency is much to be regretted, 



DATA FOR ASCERTAINING AGES. 135 

seeing that it is often of serious importance to the interests 
of society that means should be possessed for determining 
the exact period of a given life. The most important of all, 
the data whereby the age of one of our own species naay be 
determined, are as yet altogether undiscovered. Though 
long habits of social intercourse may enable us to guess 
pretty nearly, by the altered form of the features, wrinkles 
where once was smoothness, changes in the color and luxu- 
riance of the hair, also in the gait and general physical 
exterior, still it is only a guess ; we cannot be sure until we 
have consulted the register or the family Bible. With the 
lower animals it is a little easier; the age of the horse, for 
instance, to about eight or nine years old, may be told by 
its teeth ; the horns of certain quadrupeds similarly announce 
their ages up to a given epoch ; in birds the age may some- 
times be deduced from the wear and altered form of the 
bill; in the whale it is known by the size and number of the 
laminae of " whale-bone," which increase yearly, and seem to 
indicate a maximum of three or four hundred years to this 
creature; the age of fishes appears to be marked on their 
scales, as seen under a microscope; and that of molluscous 
animals, such as the oyster, in the strata of their shells; 
still, there is no certain and connected knowledge in refer- 
ence to any but the first-named, and even this applies only 
to the youth of the animal. Of all the forms of nature. 
Trees alone disclose their ages candidly and freely. In the 
stems of all trees which have branches, that is to say, in all 
"Exogens," the increase takes place by means of an annual 
deposit of wood, spread in an even layer upon the surface 
of the preceding one. The deposits commence the first sum- 
mer of the tree's existence, and continue as long as it sur- 
vives; hence, upon taking a horizontal section of the stem, 
a set of beautiful concentric circles becomes visible, each 
circle indicating an annual deposit, and thus marking a year 



136 VARIOUS RATE OP GROWTH IN TREES. 

in the biography of the general mass. So much for the 
felled tree; in the living and standing one of course the 
circles are concealed from view; to learn their number here, 
therefore, some ingenuity is required. The simplest . and 
most certain method is to burrow into the trunk with an 
instrument like an immense cheese-taster, which intersects 
every layer, and draws out a morsel of each, sufficiently dis- 
tinct for enumeration. Where this is not convenient, the 
age may be estimated by ascertaining, as nearly as possible, 
the annual rate of increase, then taking the diameter of the 
trunk at about a yard from the ground, and calculating by 
" rule of three." Thus, if in the space of an inch there be 
an average of five annual layers, a hundred inches will an- 
nounce five hundred years of life. The latter method 
requires to be used, however, with extreme caution, because 
of the varying rate of growth, both in individual trees, and 
in their different species. In the earlier periods of life, trees 
increase much faster than when adult; the oak, for instance, 
grows most rapidly between its twentieth and thirtieth years ; 
and when old, the annual deposits considerably diminish, so 
that the strata are thinner, and the rings proportionately 
closer. Some trees slacken in rate of growth at a very early 
period of life; the layers of the oak become thinner after 
forty, those of the elm after fifty, those of the yew after sixty. 
Unless allowance be made for this, and also for the irregular 
thickness of the layers, which vary both with seasons and 
with the position of the tree in regard to the sun, errors are 
inevitable. The concentric circles are not equally distinct 
in the different kinds of trees; the best examples occur per- 
haps in the cone-bearers, as the fir, cedar, and pine. The 
opinion not infrequently held, that the trees of cold and 
temperate countries show them better than those of the 
tropics, is, however, a mistaken one. Certainly there are 
equinoctial woods in which they are less decidedly marked 



PALM TREES. 187 

than in particular European species, but in others again 
they are plainer. Indistinctness and emphasis in the rings 
are phenomena independent of climate, being characteristic, 
in fact, of particular species, genera, and even families. 
There are trees which are altogether destitute of rings. 
These belong to the class called "Endogens," of which the 
noblest and typical form is the Palm. Here the sign of age 
is furnished by the scars or stumps of the fallen leaves, which 
are of enormous size, few in number, and produced only 
upon the summit of the lofty, slender, branchless trunk. A 
certain number of new leaves expand every year, and about 
an equal number of the oldest decay, so that by taking the 
total of the scars, and dividing it by the average annual de- 
velopment of new leaves, a tolerable approximation may be 
come to. But it can rarely be relied upon ; it is a method 
indeed by no means universally practicable, the scars of the 
fallen leaves being very variable in their degree of perma- 
nence in different species. The fan-leaved palms preserve 
their scars only at the lowest part of the stem ; they lose 
them as they increase in age and height, so that from the 
middle to the top it is nearly bare. Sternberg says that the 
fossil Lepidodendra are the only plants in which the scars 
remain perfect throughout the entire length. Wood-sections, 
neatly cut and polished, so as to display the concentric 
circles, are highly ornamental objects, independently of 
their scientific instructiveness. A collection of specimens 
from the lopped boughs of the hedgerows and plantations, 
and from the timber-yard of the furniture-maker, where 
many rich exotics may be procured, rivals in beauty a 
cabinet of shells or fossils, and quite as abundantly rewards 
intelligent employment of the leisure hour. 

79. Of the potential longevity of a tree or plant, a pretty 
fair estimate may be arrived at from a variety of circum- 
stances. For example, there are relations between the ^ 

12 « 



138 FRUITFULNESS IN RELATION TO LONGEVITY 

duration of life and the quality of the fruit Avhich plants 
produce. Those which give tender and juicy fruit, or at all 
events such trees as do this, are in general shorter-lived than 
those which yield hard and dry, and these are shorter-lived 
than such as produce only little seeds. The apple and the 
pear live shorter lives than nut-trees, which are out-lived in 
turn by the birch and the elm, as these are by the major 
part of the Coniferse, in which long-lived family there is 
probably not a species that does not flourish for at least a 
hundred years. The Alpine firs and larches frequently 
attain five centuries, and even the common red pine and 
the Scotch fir reach three to four. With a few exceptions, 
the seeds of the whole family are noticeably small, though 
the containing cones may be of considerable size. One of 
the greatest trees in the world, the Wellingtonia gigantea of 
California, a member of this tribe, with an estimated maxi- 
mum age of two thousand years, has a beautifully-formed 
but remarkably small cone, and seeds in proportion. Such 
trees as the birch, the elm, and the conifers, are useful to 
man for their timber, a service rarely rendered by the fruit- 
bearers. Trees again, that yield pleasant fruit, fit for human 
food, ordinarily live for shorter periods than those of which 
the produce is bitter and austere, and unserviceable to him 
as an edible. Most, if not all of the plants on which man 
in his civilized state depends for food, are exceedingly short- 
lived. The Cerealia or corn-producing plants, as wheat, 
rice, barley, and oats, are annuals without exception ; so are 
nearly all kinds of pulse. The large classes of esculent 
vegetables represented by the turnip, carrot, and cabbage, 
are also either annual or biennial. How much man has 
benefitted by this wise arrangement it is impossible to esti- 
mate. Did his daily bread grow on longseval trees, like 
acorns, asking no care and toil, the most efiicient means to 
his development would have been wanting, as is still evi- 



BULK IN KELATION TO LONGEVITY. 139 

denced in the lands of the cocoa-nut and banana ; but de- 
pending, as he has been so largely obliged to do, on annual 
plants, demanding incessant care, they may be gratefully 
regarded as the prime instrument of his rise in intelligence 
and morals. 

80. The form or configuration of plants has most im- 
portant relations with their lease of life. Those trees usually 
live to the greatest age which attain the least vertical height . 
in proportion to the diameter of their trunks, and the lateral 
spread of their branches. Size and substance have also to 
be taken note of. Small and attenuate plants almost always 
live for shorter periods than bulky ones, and tender and 
delicate species than the stout and hard-grained. The latter 
owe their longer lives, in a physiological point of view, to 
the abundance of firm, fibrous matter which enters into 
their composition, and without which it appears indeed impos- 
sible that any considerable age can be arrived at, though 
there are instances where hard and durable wood is found 
in trees of briefer life than some that are soft-wooded. The 
lime-tree has softer wood than the walnut, beech, and pear, 
yet lives longer than either of them; and the Baobab of 
Senegal, which undoubtedly lives to a great age, though 
some of the accounts of it are probably exaggerated, is said 
to be so soft that it may be sliced with a knife. That bulk 
should be accompanied by long duration, it is easy to under- 
stand. The larger a plant or tree, the greater is the surface 
which it exposes to the atmosphere; and as it feeds by every 
leaf, the scope and opportunity for the exercise of the vital 
functions is proportionately extended. The more leaves a 
tree can put forth, and maintain in healthy action, the firmer 
is its hold upon the future. Viewed in regard to their an- 
nual rejuvenescence, trees may be regarded as little worlds 
in themselves, — solid masses from which a multitude of 
separate and perfect plants is vernally put forth, every new 



140 TEXTURE IN RELATION TO LONGEVITY. 

shoot and twig being exactly analogous to an annual that 
has risen from a seed. As the successive generations of 
plants fill the earth more and more with the seeds of life, 
and thus both maintain its actual richness in verdure and 
blossom, and enlarge its potential, in reference to years to 
come, so the annual crops of twigs and leaves that clothe 
the tree, by their re-action tend to consolidate and strengthen 
it. The more exuberant its fertility, the more does it aug- 
ment in energy of life, — j)icturing therein, one of the finest 
truths in our spiritual history; the soul energizes as it works. 
But extent of leafy surface will not of itself induce longevity. 
There are many annuals that develope an immense amount 
of leaf, as the gourd and the melon. In such plants, it is 
counteracted by their exceedingly rapid growth, and conse- 
quent want of solidity ; for while too great a degree of solidi- 
fication of the tissues, whether in plants or animals, hinders 
their proper vital activity, especially those great processes 
on which life so eminently depends, namely, the free move- 
ment of the juices, — the other extreme, or a too lax and 
succulent texture, is no less surely fatal to stability and en- 
durance. Such texture is almost always found in the short- 
lived plants, coming, as in the gourd, of their rapid exten- 
sion, while firm, dense, and compact texture is fully as 
characteristic of the longgevals. Compare the wood of the 
yew and the box-tree with that of the soft, sappy black 
poplar, and the willows that "spring by the water-courses." 
Fungi, mushrooms, and toadstools, which, as regards their 
superterraneous portion, are the most i*apid in development 
of any plants, often reaching their full size in the course of 
a night, are also the loosest in texture, and the soonest and 
speediest to dissolve. Some decay in a few hours ; while none, 
perhaps, last longer than from seven to fifteen days, except- 
ing the perennial Polypori and their congeners, the life of 
which extends to several years. Beautiful specimens of 



CLIMATE AND LONGEVITY. 141 

these last, of a rich and glossy brown, have been sent to me 
from New Brunswick, where they grow upon the birch and 
maple trees! 

81. The distinction of annual, biennial, and perennial, in 
regard to the duration of plants, is liable to be aifected by 
certain accidents, but the changes are never so great or so 
deeply-seated as for the principle of a fixed lease of life to 
be abnegated by them. An inhospitable climate will shorten 
the life of perennials to a single season, as happens with 
mignonette, which in Barbary is shrub-like, and with the 
Palma-Christi, which in India is a stately tree, though in 
England neither survives a year in the open air; on the 
other hand, unsuitable food, excess of wet, or any other cir- 
cumstance by which the flowering of the plant is retarded, 
will induce unaccustomed longevity. This brings us to the 
consideration of one of the greatest truths in the philosophy 
of nature, namely, that all living things exist, and feed, and 
grow, and gather strength^, in order that they may propagate 
their race. Doubtless, things universally have their social 
uses to subserve, and to perform which they were originally 
created, and are sustained in their respective places by the 
Almighty; but all these uses have reference, essentially, to 
the great ultimate use of preserving the race extant upon 
the earth, and multiplying it indefinitely, seeing that in the 
maintenance and multiplication without end of receptacles 
of His Life, consists the highest glory of God. This is the 
end and design not only of the physical, but even of the 
moral and intellectual uses performed by mankind towards 
one another, all of them tending, more or less directly, to 
promote and adorn it. However unconscious we may be of 
their influence and private agency, and however little we 
may feel ourselves to be personally identified with the result, 
the perpetuation of the race is at once the beginning and 
the end of all the feelings incident to our nature. What- 



142 DEATH BALANCED BY REPRODUCTION. 

ever we may seem to ourselves to be working for, the secret 
aspiration of the heart is always Home and one's own fire- 
side, bright and sweet with filial conjugal affection; every 
virtue, desire, and passion, that stirs the soul, may finally be 
referred hither; in a word, whatever is friendly to humanity, 
in any of its needs, whatever gives life and solidity to ex- 
istence, is a collateral means to reproduction, and was pur- 
posely introduced to aid it, and without such aid reproduc- 
tion would languish and at last fail. Why reproduction is 
the great end of physical existence, is found in its needful- 
ness as the counterpoise of Death. As the destiny of all 
things is to die, were there no means established for their 
replacement, the earth would soon become a desolate void ; 
but through the magnificent law of procreation, nothing is 
ever extinguished, nor a gap ever caused that is not instantly 
filled up. Though Time slays and devours every individual 
in turn, whether animal or plant; by procreation the species 
is preserved perfect and immortal, the whole of nature un- 
changed and ever young. 

States fall, Arts fade, but Nature doth not die ! 

By the continual succession of beings, all exactly resembling 
one another, and their parents and ancestors, the existence 
of any one of them is virtually maintained in perpetuity ; 
the balance and the relations of the different parts of nature 
are kept intact, and to philosophic view. Time itself, rather 
than the temporal, is the slain one. Thus looked at, with 
the eyes of a large philosophic generalization, all the indi- 
viduals of any given species that have ever existed, and all 
that have yet to come into existence, form but one great 
Whole ; the process of reproduction whereby they follow 
one another in the stream that unites the living representa- 
tives to the primaeval Adam of the race, being only Nutri- 
tion on a grand and perennial scale. Every individual, so 



REPRODUCTION THE END OP LIFE. 143 

long as it lives its little life, is the species in miniature, 
reproducing all its tissues as fast as they decay, through 
vital action and reaction, or marriage in its simplest form ; 
conversely, the aggregate of the individuals, or the race, is 
as it were a single one, diffused over an immense area of 
time and country, and nourishing and regenerating itself by 
means of that highest and most complicated play of the 
marriage-principle which the word marriage popularly de- 
notes. Every man, for example, and every woman, con- 
sidered physiologically, is the human race in little, every- 
thing that belongs to the race being enacted, essentially and 
daily, in their individual bodies ; at the same moment every 
man and every woman- is but as a molecule of one great 
Homo, now some six thousand years of age, and spread 
over the whole surface of the earth. 

82. Feeding, growing, all the vital functions and phe- 
nomena of the earlier stages of life are to be regarded 
accordingly, as Nature's preliminaries to Reproduction. 
Every part of organic creation illustrates this, but in the 
plant it is seen in chief perfection, excepting only the but- 
terfly, in whose little life the history is epitomized. In the 
first or grub state, it is a creeping cormorant; the alimentary 
organs greatly predominate, and growth is rapid. In the 
last or winged state, on the other hand, though it sips from 
a thousand blossoms, it takes little or no sustenance, the 
excess of intestinal canal has given way to the generative 
organs, which now assume the mastery, and up to the time 
of its early death, influence almost exclusively its habits. 
Many kinds of butterflies cannot eat indeed, if they would, 
for they have no mouths. Adorned in their bridal vestments, 
love and pleasure, as they flirt their painted fans, form the 
brief and brilliant pastime with which they close their days. 
The winged state of the butterfly is what the period of 
flowering is to plants, and the reason why longer life is 



144 PROLONaATION OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 

occasioned to plants by delay in flowering, as above alluded 
to, is that in the flowers are contained their organs of pro- 
creation. Hence until they have bloomed they must needs 
remain childless, or with the consummation of life unreal- 
ized and unattained. Procreation, or the production of 
seed, is made to actuate plants with a vital impulse so 
wonderful and so like the instinct of animals towards the 
same end, that no other name conveys an adequate idea of 
it; they prepare for the efiectuation of it from the first 
m.oment of existence, and until they have accomplished 
their purpose, unless killed by intense cold, or sudden and 
absolute deprivation of nourishment, will keep their hold 
on life with a tenacity almost invincible. It may be taken 
as an axiom in vegetable physiology, that cceteris paribus, no 
plant dies a natural death till it has ripened seeds. If its 
life be endangered, by penury of food or mutilation, the 
entire vital energy of the plant concentrates itself in the 
production of a flower, it ceases to put forth leaves, and 
expends its whole force in efibrts to secure progeny. This 
is strikingly exemplified in hot, dry gardens, and by sum- 
mer waysides, where, as if conscious of the impending 
danger, plants ordinarily of considerable stature, begin to 
propagate while scarcely an inch high. Delay in flowering, 
attended by prolonged life, is usually the result of excess of 
nourishment. Thus, if a j^lant grow in too luxurious, or 
too watery a soil, causing it to become unduly succulent, or 
if it be subjected to an atmosphere too warm for it, and 
thus unnaturally stimulated, instead of producing flowers, 
it " runs to leaf;" it passes into the condition of an over- 
fattened or pampered animal, and is similarly unfitted for 
the reproductive function ; and like the animal again, to 
re-enter upon it, must become deplethoric. No plant can 
sufier from phyllomania and be fruitful at the same moment. 
Diclinous plants, when growing in wet localities, are re- 



PROLONGATION OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 145 

markable for the excess of male flowers over female. De- 
lay in flowering and consequent prolongation of life beyond 
the usual limit, also occur through insufiiciency of nourish- 
ment, and want of kindly climatic aid. Many plants live 
longer in our gardens than in their native countries simply 
for want of the encouragement to blossom which they are 
accustomed to at home. In Mexico the great American 
Aloe comes into bloom when four or five years old, and then 
dies, while in England it drags a kind of semi-torpid exist- 
ence for so long before the flowers appear, that it is a pro- 
verb for a hundred years' preparation. Some plants may 
have their lives prolonged a little while by nipping ofi" the 
flowers as soon as they begin to fade. Here, however, so 
much of the vital energy has been expended in the produc- 
tion of the floral organs, that they never properly recover 
themselves. When the flowers of a plant, under cultiva- 
tion, become double ; that is, when they have their repro- 
ductive organs changed into petals, and are thereby pre- 
vented from seeding, their life is considerably prolonged ; 
annuals even become perennial ; Tropoeolum minus, when 
double, has endured for twelve years. The life of annuals 
may also be prolonged by grafting them upon perennials. 
Many annual Solanacese will live for years when grafted on 
ligneous species of the same genus, as the annual kinds of 
Tobacco, when grafted on the Nicotiana glauca, that beau- 
tiful woody species which grows to a greater height than a 
man. A similar extension of life may be given to some of 
the annual species of Dianthus. Lastly, as regards the 
relation of procreation to the lease of life, it is a universal 
laWj both in animals and plants, that the earlier the puberty, 
the earlier is the death. Annuals, which flower when only 
a few weeks old, die in a few months ; those plants only live 
long which do not blossom till their fifth or sixth year ; the 
highest ages inv^-riably pertain to those which are the 

13 G 



146 RESULTS OF CULTURE. 

slowest to celebrate their nuptials. Very young forest trees 
are never found in flower. 

83. Many of the conditions which affect the duration of 
vegetable life, are thus results or accompaniments of Culti- 
vation. The object of cultivation is, for the most part, 
greater fruitfulness ; few plants are cultivated merely for the 
sake of their wood or foliage ; the aim is to procure either 
more flowers to delight us with their beauty, or more seeds 
to make use of as food. In either case, the stimulation 
Avhich they receive at the hands of the gardener tends to 
hasten them on towards maturity, and to excite the repro- 
ductive energy to the utmost. The consequence is that the 
conservative power is reduced, and the organism prema- 
turely exhausted. Cultivation, therefore, as a rule, may be 
regarded as a shortener of plant-life. Of course it is only 
the life of the individual that is abbreviated; the absolute- 
lease of life in the species is unaltered and unalterable, and 
is completed wherever the individuals enjoy their existence 
unmolested. 

84. The result of one of the arts of culture makes it seem 
as if there were no such thing as a fixed lease of life in 
plants, viz., the art of propagation by slips and cuttings, 
which, when, carefully detached and placed in the soil, will 
grow into counterparts of the original, and (they themselves 
being extensible after the same manner) effect for it a kind 
of perpetuity. Vines of the time of the Roman empire, 
have been thus transmitted to the present day, gifted as it 
were, by man with a longevity unknown to their state of 
nature. Many herbaceous perennials, especially in gardens, 
possess in this aptitude such ample and efficient means of 
propagation as to incline to the belief that their flowers and 
seeds are of quite secondary importance, dedicated rather to 
the heart and appetite of man. The lily of the valley, for 
example, and the strawberry. 



INDIVIDUALITY OF PLANTS. 117 

85. To see how this curious phenomenon harmonizes with 
the indubitable law of sjDeeific lease, we have to consider the 
peculiar structure or organic composition of plants, and, as 
flowing from this latter, the nature and amount of their in- 
dividuality. The organic composition of a plant is very 
different from that of an animal. In all except the very 
lowest forms of animals, there is but one of each kind of or- 
gan, or of each set of organs, as the case may be, as one 
heart, one mouth, one set of limbs, one system of bones. 
Every organ is more or less in connection with every other, 
and not one of those which are preeminently " vital " can 
be removed without causing instant death to the whole 
fabric. The animal, in a word, is an absolute Unity, every 
part being reciprocally dependent upon every other part, 
and the springs of its life centralized. In the tree, on the 
other hand, there is no centralization ; no organ occurs only 
once ; everything is a thousand times recapitulated ; there 
are as many lungs as there are leaves, as many procreant 
parts as flowers. Like an arborescent zoophyte, a Sertu- 
laria, for example, a tree is a vast congeries of distinct or- 
ganisms, every one of them as independent of the others as 
one sheep is independent of the remainder of the flock, only 
that all are organically united, and contribute, by their 
union, to the general welfare, and to the building up of a 
magnificent social edifice. Every separate twig is a little 
plant in itself; consociated with the others, but still inde- 
pendent of them, it feeds, grows, and procreates in its own 
person. A tree, therefore (and any plant old enough to 
have thrown out buds and shoots), is at once an Individual 
and a Community. It is an Individual in respect of its 
presentation of the physiognomy and characters of the spe- 
cies, the form, the altitude, and the gracefulness or robust 
dignity ; also as standing alone, and dying at the expiration 
of an allotted term ; it is a Community in respect of its consist- 



148 TREES ARE INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES. 

ing of innumerable, minor trees. So long as the constituent 
twigs remain seated on the bough, they are subject to the 
laws and vicissitudes of the general mass, sharing its life, 
and dying when it dies ; detached from it, every one of them 
is competent to strike root, and by degrees become the pillar 
of another such edifice. A fuchsia may be multiplied into 
a hundred, in the course of a single season, without destroy- 
ing the original stem ; and every one of these hundred may, 
three years afterwards, be multiplied into as many more. 
Such division of one organism into many is possible only 
where the fountains of life are not centralized — where there 
are neither brain nor heart, the means and tokens of con- 
centration ; hence it is practicable as regards the animal 
kingdom only in those humble tribes from which these or- 
gans appear to be absent, and the nature of which approxi- 
mates to that of plants. The analogy, we may add, be- 
tween trees and the arborescent zoophytes is in various 
other ways most curious and attractive. Here we cannot 
do more than advert to their wonderful correspondence in 
respect to the longevity of the general mass. Ehrenberg 
judges that certain enormous corals which he saw in the 
Eed Sea, and parts of which are still tenanted by working 
polyps, were alive in the time of the Pharaohs, and have 
been growing and enlarging ever since. Others, of equally 
vast age, have been observed in the w^aters of tropical 
America. 

86. Dr. Harvey, in his most ingenious little book on 
" Trees and their Nature," revives the hypothesis originally 
propounded by De La Hire, and subsequently held by Dar- 
win, Mirbel, Du Petit Thenars, Gaudichaud, and others, 
that a tree is merely a mechanical and passive structure, as 
regards the trunk and woody portions, these serving simply 
to support the annual twigs, and to allow the passage of 
fluids to and from the latter, by exosmose and other physi- 



PHYSIOGNOMY OF TREES. 149 

cal and chemical laAvs. The tree, in its totality, he views, 
Avith these authors, simply as a collection of living yet per- 
fectly distinct annual tree-plants, the produce of the year, 
and of the dead remains of a still larger number, the pro- 
duce of preceding years; the living plants evolved from 
buds, and growing as parasites on the organic remains of 
the dead plants. According to this view, the stem has no 
intrinsic vitality ; and all plants whatever are annuals, those 
commonly so called differing from such as grow on trees 
merely by having their connection directly with the soil, in- 
stead of indirectly through a woody pillar. A corollary is 
that there is no natural limit either to the life of trees, or to 
their size. Schleiden holds similar opinions. After citing 
examples of old trees, he observes :— " These examples are 
quite sufficient to prove the probability of a compound 
plant living on without end. These plants die ordinarily 
in consequence of mechanical injuries. A storm breaks off 
a branch ; the broken surface is exposed to the action of 
rain-water ; decay takes place ; the firmness of the heart- 
wood becomes affected ; a new storm casts the whole tree to 
the ground, separates the trunk from the roots, and it per- 
ishes of hunger." (" Principles of Scientific Botany," p. 
538.) Let us see how this consists with facts. Every spe- 
cies of tree, like every species of animal, has its definite con- 
figuration and physiognomy, by which we recognize it 
whether covered with leaves or in the bareness of winter, 
and attains, under fair circumstances, a certain maximum 
size and height. Neither of these would be the case were 
the tree gifted with indefinite powers of life. The period of 
the culmination of the life of a tree is that when it shows its 
perfect and characteristic outline ; and this being acquired, 
though for awhile there may be little change in aspect, and 
though crops of new tvv'igs may be annually produced for 
13® 



150 MR. knight's theory of trees. 

some years, declension as inevitably follows as with a man 
after he has reached his meridian. 

87. Thus independent — actually as regards themselves, 
potentially as regards the tree — healthy cuttings are equiva- 
lent to seedlings. Strictly without doubt, the new individu- 
als procured by taking slips from a given plant, are but 
portions of it, since those plants alone can legitimately be 
called new which come from seed. There are no absolute 
beginnings anywhere in nature except as the direct produce 
of sexuality. To view them, however, with Mr. Knight, as 
portions of a whole, disconnected merely, and involved in a 
common destiny, is quite incorrect. This eminent man 
went so far as to account for the extinction of certain varie- 
ties of apples and other fruits, on the hypothesis that when 
the original tree died, the extensions of it raised from cut- 
tings, though firmly rooted, and grown into large trees 
would die likewise. According to this hypothesis, an indi- 
vidual can exist in many places at once ; the willow, for ex- 
ample, which shades the first tomb of Napoleon at St. 
Helena, is the same as that which at Ermenonville weeps 
over the ashes of Rousseau. The original and the deriva- 
tives form a whole only in a historical point of view. In 
regard to the lease of life, a vigorous cutting is in the same 
position as a seed, and the tree raised from it enjoys a com- 
j)lete and independent term of being. It has nothing to do 
with the lease of its predecessor, but commences life de 
novo, and attains the age proper to the species. Probably 
enough, a cutting taken from an old and enfeebled tree, past 
its climacteric, may be unable to develop itself luxuriantly, 
and may die almost as soon ; but taken from a young and 
healthy one, its lease runs to the full term. Plants, it 
should be observed, are not equally capable of propagation 
in the way described. As regards trees, those of which the 
wood is light and white succeed the best, the willow, for ex- 



LEASE. OF LIFE IN ALG^. 151 

ample ; while with pines, oaks, and trees in general that 
have dense and resinous wood, the reluctance is extreme. 
Reviewing the whole matter, it will appear that so far from 
the principle of a fixed lease of life being invalidated by the 
facts of horticulture, it is verified with new illustrations. 

88. Sea-weeds, like terrestrial plants, are annual, biennial, 
or perennial. The common green Ulva is an example of an 
annual ; the great black fiici which hide the rocks on many- 
coasts with their curious bladdered drapery, are perennial ; 
the biennial include, among others, the Rhodomenia pal- 
mata, or dulse, and the Delessaria sanguinea, that lovely 
translucent plant which carries the palm with no less 
justice in the gardens of the sea, than the rose, which it emu- 
lates in color, in those of the land. 



CHAPTER IX. 

DVItATlON OF LIFE IN JlNIMAIS. 

89. In Animals, the lease of life is comparatively short. 
Though many 'species live longer than the generality of 
plants, none attaua to ages so prodigious as occur among 
the patriarchs of the forest; neither are so many species 
longseval in proportion to the whole number. The elephant 
and the swan outlive myriads of shrubs and flowers; but 
when they have themselves Avaned into senility, the leafy 
pride of many trees has scarcely begun. Few of any tribe 
of animals live more than forty years ; whereas trees, almost 
without exception, endure for at least a century. 

90. The physiological or proximate reason of this disparity 
is, that in the animal kingdom, taken as a whole, life is pre- 
sent in a higher degree of concentration. This involves a 
more elaborate and complex organization, and a greater in- 
tensity of vital action; sustained, moreover, in unbroken 
continuity, and in every portion of the fabric at once — the 
very conditions which, as illustrated in the machines con- 
structed by human art, are identified with fragility and early 
exhaustion. In plants, without doubt, the organization is 
exquisitely fine, and the vital functions are various and 
wonderful. The microscopist well knows how beautiflil is 
the system of cells, and tubes, and spiral vessels, constituting 
the internal substance of a plant ; and the physiologist, how 
admirable and profound is that vital economy which enables 
it to grow, to put forth leaves and blossoms in their proper 

152 



INDIVIDUALITY OF ANIMALS. 153 

season, and to prepare sugar, oil, farina, and the thousand 
other products which render the vegetable kingdom so inva- 
luable to man; still, it is not such an organization as per- 
tains to Animal life, which demands both new varieties of 
tissue and new forms of organic apparatus. For while the 
animal is the completion of the design so marvellously sha- 
dowed forth and prefigured in the plant, it is not merely the 
plant more nobly and curiously developed. It is a recon- 
struction of the plant, effected, certainly, with the same 
crude materials, but wrought into forms more rare and com- 
posite, and with an entirely new set of ideas superadded. It 
is a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that plant and 
animal exactly agree, even in a single circumstance of their 
respective natures. There are organs of digestion, respira- 
tion, reproduction, and so forth, in both; and there is a 
general correspondence between the functions which these 
organs severally fulfill ; but they are never the same organs, 
nor the same functions, in the strict and proper meaning of 
the word. The animal dwells on a higher platform, and all 
the phenomena of its history are in keeping. 

91. The intenser life of the animal gives it a completer 
individuality, and to this, as the end for which it is gifted 
with intenser life, is properly to be ascribed its shorter lease 
when compared with the durability of the plant. The end 
for which a thing is designed is always the noblest feature 
of its being, and therefore the most useful as well as philo- 
sophical to keep uppermost in view. It is for the sake of 
sustaining its individuality that the organization of an 
animal is so complex and elaborate; it is for the same rea- 
son that the vital functions are so varied, ceaseless, and in- 
terwoven ; and further, that they are so universal as to the 
theatre of their performance. For they are not exercised 
only at certain periods, or in certain portions of the organ- 
ism, but unceasingly, from birth to dissolution, and as vigo- 



154 ACTIVITY THE GREAT CHARACTERISTIC. 

rously in one part as another. Certain great duties are 
assigned to special organs as head-quarters, it is true; but 
practically and in effect, every organ is diffiised throughout 
the body, and every function is everywhere j)erformed. The 
heart is wherever there is blood ; the brain wherever there 
is feeling. The great characteristic of concentrated life, or 
of Individuality in high perfection, is this vivid, ceaseless, 
omnipresent Activity. In all the forms of nature which 
are endowed with it — that is, in all animals of any com- 
plexity of organization, as we saw when considering the sub- 
ject of food — there is a continual drawing-in of nutrient 
matter from without, and conversion of it into living tissue, 
and as continual a decomposition of what has previously 
been assiinilated, and concurrent expulsion of the fragments. 
Every moment, in the life of an animal, witnesses a new 
receiving, appropriation, and giving back; old age and 
rejuvenescence revolving upon each other; death destroying 
over again, and creation beginning afresh. On the excreting 
part of the process, the maintenance of the vital condition 
is more closely and immediately dej)endent than it is even 
upon the supply of new aliment. Feeding may be suspended 
for a considerable period without causing anything more 
than debility: but the removal of the effete particles gene- 
rated by the decomposition of the tissues, cannot be checked 
even for a few minutes, at least in the warm-blooded animals, 
without inducing a fatal result. For every act of respira- 
tion is in effect one of excretion, and to stay the breathing, 
as we all know, is to quench the life. 

92. In trees and plants, on the other hand, where the con- 
centration of life is slight, the individuality faint, and the 
organization comparatively simple, so simple that no part 
of the organism is absolutely dependent upon another part, 
where there are no consecrated vital centres, no heart, lungs, 
brain, or digestive cavity, existence no longer depends upon 



ANALOGIES OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS. 155 

incessant and total change of the very substance of the 
fabric, and the vital activity is proportionately low. The 
bulk of the tree, that is, all the consolidated or woody por- 
tion, and every other part* which has been finally shaped 
and hardened, instead of living by perpetual decomposition 
and reconstruction, and depending on these processes as the 
very condition of existence, remains fixed and unalterable 
till the lease of the entire organism has run out. Those 
parts only which are immediately employed in the vital pro- 
cesses, as the flowers, and leaves, and the extreme ends of 
the rootlets, in which parts there is also more concentration 
of life, are subject to such decay as takes place in the body 
of an animal. In these it occurs in close and striking cor- 
respondence; along with as complete a renovation. What 
the tissues are to the animal, the foliage is to plant and tree; 
every perennial plant, like every animal, dies innumerable 
molecular or leafy deaths prior to its total, somatic death ; 
and, as the years roll by, is reinstated in as many molecular 
or leafy lives. Autumn and spring are to the tree, by cor- 
respondence, what every day of its existence is to a living 
animal; all that is concerned in keeping it alive withers 
away, but all is rapidly renewed. The difference as to the 
time that elapses between the respective deaths and renova- 
tions, i. e., of the molecules of the animal frame, and the 
leafy atoms of the tree, in no wise robs the phenomena of 
their essential unity. That which is most concentrated is 
alwaj^s most vivacious, as the mountain-rivulet runs faster 
than the broad river of the plain. It was no mere play of 
fancy that led the ancients to call man arbor inversa. Man 
is not only man ; he is all things, every part of the universe 
in turn, according to the point of view from which we look. 
The fable of Proteus is but a description of human nature : 
'' First indeed he became a lion with noble mane, and then 
a. dragon, and a leopard, and a great bear; and he became 



156 LEASES OF LIFE IN THE MAMMALIA. 

liquid water, and a lofty-leaved tree." Flesh and blood to 
our first or anatomical ideas, under the alchemy of the ima- 
gination, the human body transmutes into tree, fountain, 
temple, and all things in succession that are beautiful and 
glorious. Things are intelligible in fact, and truly seen, 
only in the degree that we discern ourselves in them, and read 
them through the lens of human nature. " To describe any 
scene well," says Richter, "the poet must make the bosom 
of a man his camera obscura, and look at it through this ;" 
similarly, to enter into the full, philosophic understanding 
even of the simplest objects and phenomena of the world, 
we must take that " choice optic glass," the human body and 
its life. 

93. On a general survey of the ages reached by animals, 
when not shortened by violence or disease, the area of time 
which they cover is found but small compared with that of 
plants. With a few exceptions, forty, as before said, is 
about the maximum age, and three or four about the mini- 
mum. No such exact division can be made among them as 
that of annuals, biennials, and perennials, among plants, 
unless certain insects correspond to the first named. It is 
to be observed, however, that there is an ordinary maximum 
age, and an ercfra-ordinary. Every known lease of life, at 
least in the vertebrate animals, appears capable of renewal, 
or rather of extension, even to the doubling of the ordinary 
period; that is, while every creature has its customary or 
natural term, it appears competent to live, under certain 
favorable circumstances, for an extraordinary or additional 
term of the same, or nearly the same, extent. Thus, while 
the ordinary life of man is three score and ten, he is capable 
of an extraordinary life of seventy years more; the ordinary 
life of the camel is forty or fifty, but individuals sometimes 
last out the century. Query, then, which is the actual and 
original lease? And if the longer one be the original (as 



LEASES OF LIFE IN THE MAMMALIA. 157 

all the probabilities favor the belief of its being), why is it 
cut short by one-half in all but a few memorable cases ? 

94. The longest-living Mammal, after the whale, already 
mentioned, appears to be that aifectionate, docile, and saga- 
cious creature, the elephant. Nothing is known positively 
as to its lease, but the estimate of one hundred and fifty 
years is certainly not beyond the mark.* The rhinoceros 
and the hippopotamus are reputed to come next, a maxi- 
mum of seventy or eighty being assigned to each of these 
huge brutes; then, it is said, follows the camel, a meagre, 
dry, active, exceedingly hardy animal, whose useful life ex- 
tends not infrequently to fifty. The period, reckoning by 
decrements, between fifty and thirty, is reached by few. 
The stag, longseval only in romance, dies at thirty-five or 
thereabouts ; the leopard, bear, and tiger, fail fully ten years 
earlier; twenty-five or thirty is the ordinary maximum of 
the horse and ass, though the severe treatment of man rarely 
allows them to reach even this. The mule, it is worthy of 
notice, is stronger-lived and becomes older, a circumstance 
anticipated in, plants, where hybrids frequently live longer 
than their parents. The cause is probably the same in both, 
and to be found in their infertility, whereby their whole 
vigor is left at liberty for self-maintenance, instead of being 
expended in two directions. Many leases expire between 
twenty and ten. The former seems to be the ordinary maxi- 
mum of the lion, as reached in menageries, though when 
unconfined it evidently lives longer, for it has sometimes 
been found without teeth. Twenty is the limit also with the 
bull, despite his great strength, size, and solidity; the dog 
aud the wolf seldom pass eighteen ; the sheep, the goat, and 



^" An elephant aged one hundred and twenty years was put to death 
in London, in July, 1855. — Times, July 23d. 
14 



158 AGES ATTAINED BY BIRDS. 

the fox, rarely live more than twelve. The maximum of 
the domestic cat is said to be ten ; that of the rabbit, hare, 
and guinea-pig, seven or eight; that of the mouse, five or 
six, and of other such little animals about the same. As to 
the leases of the remainder of the four-footed creatures of 
our planet, excepting a dozen or so, zoology is entirely unin- 
formed, and until they shall have been ascertained, of course 
nothing like a proper list can be constructed. The animals 
which have been mentioned are certainly among the chief, 
and indicate the scope and limits which a table of ages, 
when completed, will exhibit ; but so far, the list is only like 
a boy's first map, unfurnished except with the names of the 
seas, the metropolis, and his native town. One thing is 
plain, that Man, regarded as a member of the animal king- 
dom, has no occasion to murmur at the shortness of his 
lease of .life, but should rather congratulate himself, seeing 
that he enjoys a considerably longer term, even in his ordi- 
nary duration, than the great mass of his physiological fra- 
ternity, while it is pretty certain that there is not an animal 
of his own size that does not return to dust before half as 
old. 

95. The scale of ages attained by Birds is much about the 
same as that of mammals; but taking one Avith another, 
they probably live longer in proportion to their bulk. No 
creatures are better adapted for longevity; they are pecu- 
liarly well clothed, for no covering can be more complete, 
or better calculated to preserve warmth, than their soft, 
close-lying feathers ; and as these are renewed periodically, 
they are maintained in the best possible condition. Many 
birds also cast their bills, and acquire new ones, a most ad- 
vantageous exchange for them, since they are thereby ren- 
dered so much the better able to feed themselves. Besides 
these peculiarities, birds live almost entirely in the fresh air, 
and their habits are cheerful and sportive, conditions emi- 



AGES OF FISHES. 159 

nently conducive to long life. As to the particular terms 
of life which obtain among them, Flourens says he knows 
"nothing certain." There is plenty of evidence, neverthe- 
less, that such birds as the eagle, the vulture, the falcon, and 
the swan, far surpass all others in longevity, and attain ages 
so remarkable as often to exceed very considerably that of 
man. Even the crow is reputed to live a hundred years, 
and the raven no less than ninety. There have been in- 
stances of the parrot living for sixty years a prisoner, and 
its age, when captured, would have to be added. Pelicans 
and herons are said to reach forty to fifty years; hawks, 
thirty to forty; peacocks, goldfinches, and blackbirds, about 
twenty; pheasants and pigeons, about the same; nightin- 
gales, fifteen; the robin, a little less; domestic fowls, about 
ten ; thrushes, eight or nine ; wrens, two to three. 

96. Concerning the ages of Fishes, even less is known 
than about birds. It is vaguely believed of them that they 
are longseval. The reasons for this opinion are, that the 
element in which they live is more uniform in its condition 
than the atmosphere, and that they are less subject in conse- 
quence to those injurious influences which tend to shorten 
the lives of terrestrial creatures; and secondly, that their 
bones, being of a more cartilaginous nature than those of 
land animals, admit of almost indefinite extension, so that 
the frame is longer in growing to maturity. Gesner gives 
an instance of a carp, in Germany, which was known to be 
a hundred years old; other writers assign to this fish as 
much as a hundred and fifty, and to the pike a longevity 
even greater. Hufeland remarks that natural death occurs 
among fishes more rarely than in any other part of the ani- 
mal kingdom. "The law of the transition of one into 
another, according to the right of the strongest, prevails 
here far more generally than elsewhere. One devours 
another, — the stronger the weaker. This regulation," he 



160 AGES OF REPTILES. 

continues, "is a proof of divine and exalted wisdom. If tlie 
innumerable millions of the inhabitants of the Avaters Avere 
to remain when they died a single day unentombed, they 
would speedily diffuse abroad the most dreadful pestilential 
evaporation. But passing, while scarcely dead, into the 
substance of another living being, death exists less in the 
water than on land, — ^the putrefaction takes place in the 
stomachs of the stronger." 

97. Reptiles attain surprising ages. The tortoise, Avhich 
is so slow in growing that in twenty years an increase of a 
few inches is all that can be detected, has lived even in cap- 
tivity above a century. One placed in the garden of Lam- 
beth Palace, in the time of Archbishop Laud, lived there 
till the year 1753; and its death was then induced seemingly 
through misfortune rather than old age. The enormous 
creatures of this kind, natives of the Galapagos, undoubt- 
edly live twice or thrice as long as the common species ; an 
individual possessed some years back by the London Zoolo- 
gical Society, had every appearance of being at least a 
hundred and seventy -five. Even these immense ages were 
probably far exceeded by the great fossil testudinata of the 
Himalayahs. It is easy to see the cause of such longevity. 
The same law which obtains in the mechanics of inanimate 
matter, operates in the organisms of vitalized matter, 
namely, that Avhat is gained in time must be lost in power. 
The active habits which in shorter-lived animals accelerate 
the vital processes, and bring the lease to an early close, 
here are no longer found. The tortoises have no excitable 
nervous system to wear out the durable materials encased in 
their impenetrable armor; they spend the greater part of 
their lives in inactivity, and exist rather than live. By 
analogy, it may be inferred that the loricate and ophidian 
reptiles reach an age fully as advanced as the tortoises. 



LEASES OF LIFE IN INSECTS. 161 

The crocodile, large, strong, vigorous, enclosed in a hard coat 
of mail, and incredibly voracious, is, without doubt, exceed- 
ingly long-lived. The larger serpents, also slow in growth, 
and passing a considerable portion of their lives in semi- 
torpor, are also unquestionably longseval. Feeding vora- 
ciously, at long intervals, so familiar in the case of serpents, 
seems invariably associated with prolonged life. As regards 
the Amphibia, Smellie refers to a toad known to have been 
at least thirty-six. The frog, which, by reason of its slow 
growth, in this climate at least, is incapable of producing 
young till its fourth year, reaches, however, what in propor- 
tion to this late puberty is the very inconsiderable age of no 
more than from twelve to about sixteen. 

98. Insects, for the most part, are short-lived, especially 
after their last transformation. Some, after acquiring their 
wings, live only for the remainder of the day. In calculat- 
ing the ages of insects, of course they must be reckoned 
from the hatching of the egg. Different species exist two, 
three, and even four years in the grub state; then a con- 
siderable time in the chrysalis; the winged state being 
merely that of completed maturity. That which especially 
marks the latter is the fitness of the creature for propaga- 
tion ; and this, as the period of its bloom, is also the briefest. 
The Ephemerae, in their winged state, are not even creatures 
of a day. Scarcely a single gnat, as such, survives a week ; 
not half the beetles, nor any of the grasshoppers nor Tipulse, 
those long-legged dancers of the autumn, enters on a second 
month; a fortnight sees the death of almost every kind of 
butterfly and moth. One of the longest-living insects is that 
brilliant beetle, the Scaraboeus auratus, or Rose-chaffer, the 
only one that feeds upon the flower from which it takes its 
English name. After four years spent as a grub, and a 
fortnight as a chrysalis, it has lived in captivity from two to 

14® 



162 GENERAL CAUSES OF LONGEVITY. 

three years more.* That curious but treacherous and cruel 
creature, the Mantis religiosa, or Praymg cricket, which 
holds up the foremost pair of its long, desiccated, skeleton 
legs, as if in the act of prayer, is said to attain a full 
octave. 

99. Whatever errors there may be in the particular 
figures above quoted, the general principles which they 
illustrate are indisputable. Whatever class of organisms 
we may take, the ground of longer or shorter life lies uni- 
versally in the structure, the temperament, and the less or 
greater vital energy. We have seen hoAV this is manifested 
in regard to the aggregate of organic nature ; also how it is 
verified in respect to plants ; it obtains with animals, in their 
several tribes and species, after precisely the same manner, 
only that the phenomena are played forth in greater variety, 
and in costumes appropriate to the nobler stage. All the 
diversities in the duration of animal life may be referred 
perhaps to the two general heads — of Size, as regards the 
substance of the creature, and Energy, as regards its vital 
powers. Other circumstances are but adjuncts, though in- 
separably connected with and conditional on them. All 
the longseval creatures, like all the longseval trees, are con- 
siderable in their bulk ; at all events they are the largest 
forms of their respective tribes, the swan, for example, 
among birds,f and the crocodile among reptiles ; the 
smallest forms, on the other hand, are always the shortest- 
lived. The reason consists in the ampler command which 
they possess over the world around them. As the colossal 
tree owes its longevity to its immense feeding-surface of 



* See for an entertaining account of the keeping this beautiful in- 
sect as a pet, "Episodes of Insect Life," vol. ii., p. 76. 

f The ostrich, as the largest of birds, is undoubtedly the longest 
liver, but nothing is known with certainty as to its lease. 



GENERAL CAUSES OF LONGEVITY. 163 

green leaf, so the largely-developed animal lives longer than 
the little one, because it possesses more vital capacity, more 
contact with external nature, more scope and opportunity 
for acquiring strength of every kind ; there is also greater 
power of resisting what is inimical to life, as intense cold, 
though marvelous examples of the latter property occur 
among those living riddles, the animalcules. Great size, 
however, does not carry long life with it necessarily. More 
intimately connected with longevity even than bulk, is the 
greater or less intensity of the vital action ; in proportion 
to the rapidity with which an animal lives, is invariably the 
brevity of its lease. That is, of two animals, alike in 
regard to bulk, that one will have the shortest duration 
which lives the fastest, and that one the longest which lives 
slowest. The expression " fast living," now so commonly 
applied to extravagant expenditure of the resources, involv- 
ing premature stoppage and decay, is not a mere phrase of 
gay society ; it denotes a condition of things which in nature 
is sometimes normal. The two great kingdoms of organ- 
ized nature are physiologically characterized in fact, by this 
very thing. It is because trees live so slowly that they 
endure for centuries, and because animals live so fast that 
few of them reach fifty. All the longteval animals have a 
relatively lower vital energy ; all the short-lived (or at least 
such as attain any considerable bulk) possess it in excess. 
As a result of this condition, we usually find the longseval 
creatures deliberate and stately in their movements, and 
leading calm and placid lives, as the elephant, the giraffe, 
and the swan ; while the short-lived ones are as remarkable 
for their sportive restlessness, as they course about the fields, 
or sail through the sky or water. Creatures that run much 
are rarely, if ever, long-lived. In the vegetable kingdom it 
is the same ; the longseval tree is like the elephant it shades, 
tranquil and august ; the gourd that dies with the close of 



164 REPRODUCTION AND LONGEVITY. 

summer is rampant and wanton. In the whole compass of 
nature, perhaps there is nothing more full of quiet grandeur 
than the sacred, ever-verdant cedar of twenty centuries. 

100. The circumstances of animal life which bear inti- 
mate relation to its lease, though not immediately promotive 
or preventive of longevity, are chiefly, as in plants, those 
connected with Reproduction. Early puberty, which in 
plants forebodes an early death, similarly announces it in 
animals, for it shows that maturity will soon be reached, 
and we scarcely need the proverb* to learn what happens 
next. Contrariwise, those creatures live the longest which 
are latest in acquiring ability to procreate. The long life 
of man, for example, follows as a natural sequence upon his 
protracted infancy. Other animals of his size begin to pro- 
pagate after a much earlier anniversary of birth than he 
does; they attain their puberty in a few years, or even 
months ; waiting for it the seventh part of a century, man 
is compensated at the end. The period occupied in gestation 
is remarkably correlative with the term of life. The longer 
time an animal requires for its formation in its mother's 
womb, the more extended is its life ; the shorter the period 
between conception and birth, the less is the lease extended. 
The duration of gestation is of course largely determined 
by the creature's size and organization in general. The 
bulky elephant goes with young no less than twenty months, 
and lives a century and a half; the puny rabbit requires 
only thirty days, and dies in eight years. What is reputed 
concerning the long life of the swan becomes credible when 
tested by this law ; for incubation in birds corresponds to 
gestation in mammals, and no bird, unless the ostrich, is so 
slow in hatching its eggs. The law, like all others, belongs 



* Quod cito fit, cito peril. " That which is quickly formed, quickly 
perishes." Vulgarly, "Soon ripe, soon rotten." 



GESTATION AND LONGEVITY. 165 

as much to plants, wherein the gestation of animals is pre- 
figured in the ripening of the fruit. The longseval trees are 
among the first to open their flowers (the instruments of 
vegetable coition), yet their seeds are the latest to become 
ripe, the whole season, from early spring to the close of 
autumn, being required for their proper maturation. Thus, 
though the yew blossoms in March, or several weeks before 
the apple, its berries are not ripe till the end of October ; 
the box-tree opens its flowers at the same time, but is 
scarcely parturient till winter. Many kinds of pine-trees, 
also the cedar, and several oaks, as Quercus Cerris, suber, 
and rubra, all of them long-lived, require two seasons to 
bring their fruits to perfection. On the other hand, the 
short-lived perennials, and annuals universally, complete the 
whole process of reproduction, from the opening of the 
flowers to the ripening of the seed, in the course of some six 
or seven weeks. In the mistletoe occurs a curious excep- 
tion. Like the yew and the box, it blossoms early in the 
spring, and ripens its berries certainly no sooner, perhaps 
not till near Christmas, yet it is by no means a longseval 
plant. How are we to account for this ? May it be refer- 
able to the parasitic nature f>f the plant, being dependent 
on plunder for its sustenance ? 

101. The number of young produced at a birth is again 
correlative with the duration of life. The longest-living 
animals produce the fewest, while the shortest-lived are also 
the most prolific. The female elephant, rhinoceros, hippo- 
potamus, and camel, never have more than one at a birth ; 
the horse, the ox, the stag, one, and occasionally two ; the 
goat and the sheep have from one to three or four ; the leo- 
pard and tiger, four or five ; the dog, the fox, and the cat, 
three to six ; the rabbit, four to eight ; the guinea-pig, the 
most prolific of the mammalia, four to twelve. In the hu- 
man race, where the lease of life is considerable in proper- 



166 FECUNDITY AND LONG LIFE. 

tion to the size of the body, twins come only once in every 
seventy or eighty births ; triplets only once in seven thou- 
sand.* About fifteen seems the highest number of young 
ever produced at one birth among the warm-blooded ani- 
mals ; in fact, a larger number would be incompatible with 
the economy of utero-gestation, and subsequently with that 
of the maternal nourishment, the fountains of which are 
usually about double the number of the young produced at 
a birth. It would be incompatible, also, with the fair 
sharing of the earth's surface, and thus with the fine ba- 
lance, harmony, and proportions of nature. The economy 
of incubation puts a similar limit to the number of eggs 
that a bird hatches at once, which is seldom less than two 
or three, and never above sixteen. The most astonishing 
cases of fecundity occur among fishes and insects. In the 
genus Cyprinus among the former, comprising the carp, the 
barbel, the tench, the bream, &c., hundreds of thousands of 
ova have been counted ; and in the common cod, several 
millions. Crustaceous animals often produce many thou- 
sands ; and the Batrachians, some hundreds at the least. 
Like the preceding, this great principle is exemplified also 
in plants. The number of seeds produced by annuals and 
short-lived plants is infinitely greater than trees usually 
yield ; for though in the aggregate of their crops of fruit 
trees are so fertile, in the strict physiological sense they are 
few-seeded, and not infrequently only one-seeded. In com- 
paring plants and animals as to their productiveness, we 
must remember that a tree is a nation, every bough a pro- 
vince, every branch a large district ; we have to consider, 
therefore, not the sum total of the produce of the entire 



* This proportion is not universal, varying with different nations. 
The Greenland women scarcely ever have twins ; whereas among 
the people of Chili they are remarkably common. 



LEASE OF HUMAN LIFE. 167 

number of flowers — the total, for instance, of the acorns 
upon an oak — but how many seeds are produced by each 
separate and independent flower, which is the real equiva- 
lent of the animal, the tree itself being equivalent to a 
whole herd of quadrupeds, or a whole city-full of mankind. 
Thus, the flowers of the oak-tree, which lives above a thou- 
sand years, produce, like the elephant, only one at a birth ; 
the flowers of the apple-tree, about ten ; those of the straw- 
berry-plant (a perennial), more than a hundred ; those of 
the poppy (an annual), eight thousand. That there is an 
exact ratio between the productiveness of a plant and the 
period to which it lives, is by no means asserted. There 
are plenty of few-seeded annuals, and of many-seeded peren- 
nials ; but, as a rule, the former are more fecund. Puff"- 
balls and parasitic fungi, the most ephemeral of plants, cast 
their seeds into the atmosphere like impalpable dust, agree- 
ing in their fecundity with fishes. The quantity of fruit 
produced by the entire tree or plant, corresponding as it 
does to the population of a country, has its own laws of in- 
crease and fluctuation, and is a different matter altogether 
from fertility of the species, as correlative with lease of life. 
When we find longsevals very fecund, it is probably because 
their produce is an important food to some creature of supe- 
rior rank. How few acorns ever become oaks. 

102. What may be the lease of Human life, is a question 
for which the Psalmist is almost universally acknowledged 
to have provided a final answer : " The days of our years are 
three score years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be 
four score years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is 
soon cut off", and we flee away." There are plenty of examples, 
however, of longevity far exceeding even the higher figures, 
accompanied by retention of all the faculties and powers 
the exercise of which forms the true life of man. Arguing 
from these, it has been thought that, by using proper means, 



168 LEASE OF HUMAN LIFE. 

an age of no less than two centuries may be attained ; less 
ambitious minds have been content to hope for a century 
and a half; in Genesis itself one hundred and twenty years 
are fixed, (vi. 3.) Buffon considered that the maximum 
need never be under ninety or a hundred, which " the man," 
says he, " who does not die of accidental causes, everywhere 
reaches." Flourens, the latest writer upon the subject, con- 
curs in the opinion of his famous countryman : A hundred 
years of life is what Providence intended for man; it is true 
that few reach this great term, but lioii) few do what is neces- 
sary to attain it ! With our customs, our passions, our mi- 
series, man does not die — he kills himself. If we observe 
men, we shall see that almost all lead a nervous and conten- 
tious life, and that most of them die of disappointment. 
How few, comparatively, number even the three score and 
ten! The weakness of infancy, the intemperance of the 
adult period, the violence of diseases, the fatality of acci- 
dents, and other circumstances similarly inimical to long 
life, prevent more than about seventy persons in every thou- 
sand attaining natural old age. There is great solace, never- 
theless, in the thought of what may be reached. Haller, 
who has collected a great number of examples of long life, 
reckons up more than a thousand instances of individuals 
having attained the age of one hundred to one hundred and 
ten, sixty of one hundred and ten to one hundred and twenty, 
twenty-nine of one hundred and twenty to one hundred and 
thirty, fifteen of one hundred and thirty to one hundred and 
forty, six of one hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty, 
and one of one hundred and sixty-nine. Curtis, but without 
the credibility of Haller, cites one hundred and seventy-two, 
one hundred and eighty-five, and two hundred and seven. 
As regards the life of the Antediluvians, before the question 
is examined physiologically, it may be well for those who are 
curious about it to be sure what the inspired narrative really 



RELATION OF MATURITY TO TERM OF LIFE. 169 

means. When the belief that the names of th^ patriarchs 
denote communities rather than individuals, shall be shown 
to be more at variance with the spirit and the object of the 
sacred records than the popular opinion is, it will be time to 
take it up as a matter of science. A noted living theologian 
suggests from out of one of the darkest caves of literalism, 
that our first parents did actually eat of the Tree of Life, 
and that its virtue was transmitted through several successive 
generations, till at last it became dissipated and lost, and 
man was reduced to a miserable tithe of his first possession.* 
103. Flourens fixes a hundred as the normal life of man 
on the principle that there is an exact ratio between the 
period occupied in growing to maturity and the full term or 
lease of existence, a principle which he shows pretty conclu- 
sively to prevail throughout the whole of the mammalia. 
Aristotle was the first to enunciate this great doctrine; Buf- 
fon the first to throw it into coherent shape. As set forth 
by the latter, it teaches that every animal lives, or at least 
is competent to live, from six to seven times as many years 
as it consumes in growing. The stag, he tells us, is five or 
six years in growing, and lives thirty-five or forty in all ; the 
horse is about four, and lives to be twenty-five or thirty. " One 
thing only," says Flourens, " was unknown to Bufibn, namely, 
the sign that marks the term of growth." This is the essen- 
tial point; it is by having determined the sign that Flourens 
has vitalized the doctrine, which, so long as it lay undisco- 
vered, was little better than a speculation. There might be 
no hesitation in conceding the theory; but until the basis 
of the calculation could be indisputably shown, there could 



* See, on the non-literal character of the statements respecting the 
ages of the Antediluvians, Eev. E. D. Rendell's "Antediluvian 
History," chapter xviii., (1850), also the "Prospective Keview," vol. 
ii., p. 251. 

15 H 



170 MATURITY MARKED IN THE BONES. 

be no security felt in the conclusions. Still, it was a grand 
idea — one of those fine truths in outline which nature seems 
to delight in sketching on the thoughts of imaginative men, 
and filling up gradually and at leisure. The maturity of 
the body in general of course consists in the maturity of all 
its parts, but the period of such maturity difiers almost as 
much as the parts themselves. The muscles, the composition 
of the vocal apparatus, even the eye-brows, have their re- 
spective periods of perfect development, and were we mi- 
nutely acquainted with every particular of the body, each 
would probably furnish the sign required. Flourens finds 
it in the Bones. The bones are the basis of the whole sys- 
tem ; they are the first principle, so to speak, of its configu- 
ration ; they support, defend, and contain the nobler organs. 
To fulfill these functions, they uniformly require to be pos- 
sessed of the three mechanical properties of firmness, light- 
ness, and tenacity, and in order to these it is needful that 
they be exquisitely organized. We are apt to suppose, from 
the hardness and durability of bones, that even in the living 
body they are scarcely vital ; that they should be subjects 
of gradual and delicate growth, seems almost impossible to 
conceive. But minute anatomy, the most pleasing and re- 
warding part of the science of the human fabric, shows 
bones to be as full of life, in their degree, as any of the 
softer parts, and that the organization is inferior to none. 
In order that they shall possess the three properties alluded 
to, bones are formed of two principal ingredients, an animal 
matter and an earthy matter, intimately interblended. In 
the bones of the infant the quantity of earthy matter is com- 
paratively small, and the animal substance itself is softer 
than at later periods. As it grows, however, the proportions 
change; tlje animal matter becomes firmer; earthy particles 
are deposited in it abundantly, and the bone gradually as- 
sumes its proper density. The total of the process consti- 



HOW OSSIFICATION PROCEEDS. 171 

tiites "ossification." The proportion of earthy to animal 
matter is not the same in the different bones. The maximum 
occurs in those of the head ; the long bones of the limbs 
have the next largest quantity, those of the upper limbs ex- 
ceeding the lower; and last of all come the bones of the 
trunk. Thus, the 

Earthy matter. Animal matter. 

Temporal bone contains 63*50 36"50 

Humerus " 63-02 36-98 

Femur " 62-49 37-51 

The earthy matter is not deposited in every part at once ; it 
spreads, so to speak, from ossific centres, gradually diffusing 
itself throughout the mass. This is of the utmost import- 
ance to observe, for it is upon this apparently trifling cir- 
cumstance that the whole of the conclusions are primarily 
founded. In all the long bones, as those of the legs and 
arms, there are portions at the extremities which, at first, or 
in the child, are united to the intermediate portion only by 
the cartilage or animal matter of which the bone then prin- 
cipally consists. These end-portions of the bone (called its 
epiphyses) are ossific centres — points at which the deposition 
of earthy matter commences, and from which it gradually 
extends. As growth proceeds, ossification progresses from 
the middle part of the bone towards the epiphyses, and 
from the epiphyses towards the middle part, till at last they 
are joined into one continuous mass of hard, completed 
bone. As soon as the junction is effected, and the bone 
consolidated, growth is completed, and the sign of matu- 
rity established. "As long," says Flourens, " as the bones 
are not united to their epiphyses, the animal grows ; when 
once the bones and their epiphyses are united, the animal 
grows no more." Not that growth is completed and matu- 
rity established, in that strict sense of the words which 



172 MAN FITTED TO LIVE A HUNDRED YEARS. 

would imply an absolutely stationary condition thencefor- 
wards, or at least of tlie whole body. There is no period 
when the system is absolutely stationary ; it is always either 
advancing to a state of perfection, or receding from that 
state. The skeleton alone remains fixed. " It is true that 
at the adult age, the determinate height and figure, the set- 
tled features, and in man, the marked moral and mental 
character, naturally gave rise to the supposition that a fixed 
point has been attained ; but a little inquiry soon teaches us 
that the individual is still the subject of progressive changes. 
The capability of powerful and prolonged muscular exer- 
tion increases for some years ; there must consequently be a 
change in the muscular tissue. The intellectual faculties 
have not attained their maximum, although we do not hesi- 
tate to consider them mature ; we must therefore infer that 
there is a corresponding development in the substance of 
the brain." In the camel, Flourens goes oh to say, the 
union of the epiphyses to the bones is completed at eight 
years old, in the horse at five, in the ox at four, in the cat 
at eighteen months, in the rabbit at twelve months, and in 
every case the duration of life is five times, or pretty nearly, 
the age of the creature when this process is accomplished. 
Flourens does not differ essentially from Buffon in saying 
five times instead of six or seven times the period of matu- 
rity, because Buffon fixed maturity at earlier epochs. It is 
the same thing in the end to say seven times five with Buf- 
fon, or five times seven with Flourens. In man, the union 
of the epiphyses to the bones takes place at twenty years of 
age, and as observation appears to establish five as the le- 
gitimate number by which to multiply in regard to the re- 
mainder of the mammalia, the conclusion is that five times 
twenty, or a hundred, is the normal lease in our own spe- 
cies. If the principle be sound — and there is no reason for 
distrust — to determine the lease of life in animals where it 



LONGEVITY INFLUENCED BY SEX AND MARRIAGE. 173 

will apply, will be, for the future, a comparatively easy 
matter. A few careful examinations of the bones in grow- 
ing individuals will enable the period of maturity to be 
learned with certainty, and five times this period may be 
inferred to be the lease.* 

104. Numerous facts of a miscellaneous character invite 
our notice in regard to the duration of human life. Cceteris 
paribus, large men are said to live longer than little ones ; 
married men longer than bachelors. Celibacy as well as 
marriage has its advocates in this respect, the fact probably 
being that there is plenty of illustration of both opinions, 
though on the whole, matrimony certainly has the advan- 
tage. We may reconcile the different views by considering 
that in the one case there is less wear and tear of the vital 
energy ; and that in the other the weakened frame is re- 
stored and replenished by the tender offices of affection. 
" If two lie together then they have heat, but how can one 
be warm alone ?" As a rule, longevity is greater in women 
than in men. Childbirth and its antecedents occasion in- 
deed a considerable loss of life ; the age of puberty carries 
off eight per cent, more maidens than youths ; the propor- 
tion of deaths in parturition is one in one hundred and 
eight; the difference, however, which these losses would 
seem to produce disappears in the general average. Either 
sex may calculate their probability of life by reckoning the 
difference between the age already attained and ninety. 



* For a variety of other and curious details on the subject of the 
duration of life, both in man and the lower animals, such as it is 
unnecessary here to introduce, the student may refer to the works 
of Flourens, Hufeland, and BufFon, above cited, and on the particu- 
lar subject of maturity, to the article "Age," in Todd's Cyclopaedia 
of Physiology. See also the reviews of Flourens in Blackwood for 
May, 1855, and Colburn for July of the same year. 
15* 



174 LONGEVITY AFFECTED BY PUKSUITS. 

Half that difference is what the assurance offices would call 
their " expectation." For example, a man of forty years 
old has fifty between his age and ninety; half of that fifty is 
twenty-five ; and provided he is free from any undermining 
disease, he may trust that for those twenty-five years he will 
continue, with God's blessing, to enjoy the honor and privi- 
lege of existence. One thing it is important to remember — 
the period of maturity is the only one that admits of pro- 
longation. Infancy, childhood, and youth, have certain 
limits, which are seldom come short of or exceeded. The 
same in old age — it cannot endure beyond a certain length 
of time, and when once it begins, it speedily leads to the 
grave. In other words, neither childhood nor old age can 
be arrested ; middle life alone can be stretched out. Of the 
three conditions of life we cannot possibly alter the first and 
third, for they are out of our control ; the middle one we 
may abbreviate or prolong, since it is left for us to deal 
with as we choose. The influence of pursuits and occupa- 
tions on the duration of life has often been illustrated. The 
average is said to be with clergymen sixty-five years ; with 
merchants sixty-two ; farmers sixty-one ; military men fifty- 
nine ; lawyers fifty-eight ; artists fifty-seven, and so on. Po- 
verty and destitution tend to shorten life; comfort and 
happiness to prolong it. 



CHAPTER X. 

GltOUNJiS OF THE VAJilOUS IjEASE OF IiIFF. SPIRITUAXi 
SASIS OF JSTATUMF, 

105. The primary, essential reasons of the diversity in 
the duration of life (as distinct from the proximate or phy- 
siological), are comprised in the law of Coeeespondence, 
and the law of Use, the two great principles which furnish 
the whole rationale of existence. Coeeespondence un- 
folds the relation of the material world to the spiritual, and 
shows the first Causes of visible nature; Use instructs us 
as to the particular Ends for which the various objects of 
creation have been designed, and the necessity there is for 
every one of them. Springing out of these laws, and de- 
pendent on them, is the condition of Foem, by which term 
is to be understood not merely the configuration of a thing, 
but the total of the circumstances which establish its iden- 
tity, such as the size, organization, and vital economy; and 
according to these last, according to the peculiarities of the 
Form, is eventually determined the duration of the life. 
The inmost, original causes of the diversity in the lease of 
life we thus discover in spiritual philosophy, the last, con- 
cluding ones, in the philosophy of nature. We should 
accustom ourselves thus to trace things to their first begin- 
nings, whatever may be the subject of investigation. Our 
mental progress is immensely contingent upon it ; desire to 
discover, and success in finding them, are the surest signs 
of enlarging intellectual empire. For the true philosophy 

175 



176 THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 

of cause and effect does not consist in the simple determina- 
tion of immediate antecedents, nor is it satisfied to remain 
in them. Every cause is itself only the effect of a still finer 
cause, ^vhich again results from a yet finer, no longer phy- 
sical, necessarily, and the whole chaia, from beguming to 
end, must be considered, if we would acquire a just notion 
of the last effect. Nowhere is it more needfiil to investigate 
these successive causes than in regard to the duration of 
life. To see the reasons of longer and shorter life purely in 
its organic apparatus, is to see the cause of Language in the 
movements of the lips and tongue. It is a truth, but riot 
the whole, nor the vital truth. Every physical fact is the 
last issue and expression of something sj)iritual, which must 
be sought before the former can become properly intelligible, 
and to which reason will direct its steps, though half-reason 
may stand indifferent and mocking. 

106. With Correspondence, accordingly, or the relations 
of the material world with the Spiritual, lies our first con- 
cern. To enter successfully upon the consideration of it, 
obviously requires that we should hold clear ideas of what 
the material and the spiritual respectively are. Concerning 
these we must therefore primarily inquire, and especially 
concerning the spiritual world. Strictly, the consideration 
of the spiritual expression of Life should precede that 
of the spiritual World. The obligation to take the latter 
before its time comes of the fact that all great truths have 
many points of contact, whereby it becomes impossible to 
treat intelligibly of any one of them without approaching 
and anticipating others. The truth, however, of the general 
system which comprises them is declared by it, since in order 
to the harmony of a whole, every part must be in alliance, 
and the insulation of any one part impracticable. The 
spiritual world is no mere abstraction. Viewed theologically, 
it is the place in which we shall consciously reside after the 



THE MATERIAL WORLD REPRESENTATIVE ONLY. 177 

death of our material bodies, enjoying its sunshine, or walk- 
ing wretched in its gloom, according as we have adapted 
ourselves during our time-life ; — viewed philosophically, it is 
the same old beautiful world of God with which :we are 
familiar under the name of earth and sky, only on a higher 
plane of creation, and prior to it. When we would think 
accurately of "Nature," we must not confine ourselves to 
the visible world. "Nature," in the full sense of the word, 
denotes whatever exists externally to the Creator, not having 
been planned by human contrivance, or executed by human 
labor, thus not only earth and sky, but the heavenly man- 
sions also. The one is physical nature ; the other, spiritual 
nature; and the former presupposes the latter. The world, 
say rather the worlds, — those sparkling spheres we call the 
planets and the stars, — are not independent and original 
creations. Every one of them is derived and representa- 
tive, a sequence and disclosure of some anterior sphere in 
the spiritual world. Every object they contain is of similar 
history and origin, a figure demonstrating the spiritual, and 
supported by it. Not that the physical world is destitute 
of Reality. By no means the mere illusion of the mind 
which certain metaphysicians would have us believe, — for 
there are no quintessential metaphysics that can gainsay 
common sense, — the material world is emphatically a Eeal 
one. On the other hand, it is quite as wrong and unphilo- 
sophical to think of it, as many do, as primitive, independent, 
self-supporting. When we look on a beautiful landscape, 
we see mountains, trees, rivers, real and substantial as re- 
gards the material universe; nevertheless, only images of 
forms originally existing in a world which we do not see, and 
from which they are derived; — forms that are neither com- 
prised within material space, nor related to terrestrial time, — 
forms which are as real, therefore, as the material; yea, 
infinitely more so, since the material is local and temporary, 

H « 



178 SPIRITUAL AND NATURAL SUBSTANCE. 

whereas the spiritual is unlimited, and the home of immor- 
tality. Nothing exists except by reason of the spiritual 
world; whatever pertains to the material is purely and 
simply Effect ; — a fact in itself commending the spiritual to 
our philosophic curiosity and affection, since, — as all well 
know who are ever so little in the habit of meditating upon 
things not present to the bodily sight, — it is only by think- 
ing of the invisible productive powers, in connection with 
the resulting products, that the latter acquire true being, life, 
beauty, and physiognomical expression. Seeing how the 
material world changes, yet how permanent it is, we cannot 
persuade ourselves but that there must be an indestructible 
and vigorous something which underlies and from time to 
time refashions it, — something which is the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever. Whatever shajje a material organism 
may possess, nothing but spirit, we are well assured, can act. 
Only by virtue of force communicated from something 
spiritual, is matter, under any circumstances, consolidated 
and configured. In itself matter is unable to effect any- 
thing; it passes indifferently from mould to mould without 
retaining the shape of any. That invisible, potent some- 
thing cannot be a mere Energy either. A Cause, that is to 
say, an active, productive force, cannot be efficient unless it 
operate from and through a substance. If there be a spirit- 
ual world at all, it must be like the material world, substan- 
tial. Substance must not be confounded with matter. Sub- 
stance is a generic term ; matter is one of the species which 
it includes. Substance is that which is indispensable to the 
being of a thing, as the continent of its sustaining life. For, 
to be is the same as to be alive, which is to be a recipient of 
life ; and wherever life is received, whether in the material 
world or the spiritual, there must needs be a substance to 
receive it. Granted, the substance of the spiritual world 
cannot be detected or defined scientifically. But that there 



SUBSTANCE AND MATTER. 179 

is such a substance may nevertheless be affirmed, just as 
reasonably as when we hear Echo, we may affirm an echo- 
producing instrument. Spiritual substances are none the 
less real because out of the reach of chemistry or edge-tools, 
or because they are inappreciable by the organs of sense. 
Indeed it is only the grosser expressions of matter which can 
be so treated, and which the senses can apprehend. Heat 
and electricity are as truly material as flint and granite, yet 
man can neither cut, nor weigh, nor measure them ; while 
the most familiar and abundant expression of all, the Air 
which we breathe, can neither be seen nor felt till put in 
motion. As for invisibility, which to the vulgar is the proof 
of non-existence, no warning is so incessantly addressed to 
us, from every department of creation, as not to commit the 
mistake of disbelieving simply because we cannot see. 
When we reflect how many things there are which cannot 
be measured and comprehended even by Thought, which 
nevertheless are true, visibility to the material eye, as the 
test of reality, sinks to the least and lowest value. Each 
class of substances is real in relation to the world it belongs 
to; — material substances in the material world; spiritual 
substances in the spiritual world; and each kind has to be 
judged of according to its place of abode. Distance in nature 
from the material no more disproves the existence of the 
spiritual, than distance in space disproves the existence of 
the bottom of the sea. The common notion of spirit is that 
of an attenuate form of matter; that it is what matter would 
become were it rarified into a perfectly free, fluent, unfixed, 
unbounded condition; and conversely, that matter is con- 
gealed or concreted spirit, bearing to it something of the 
same relation that ice does to steam, or a pastile to the 
fragrance into which it burns. Spirit and matter are utterly 
and incommensurably distinct; under no circumstances are 



180 ART DERIVED FROM THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 

they transformable or convertible.* To deny the existence 
of spiritual substance, is to assert that heaven is an empty- 
void, whereas St. John represents it as a plenitude of objects 
and scenery, of the most substantial kind. It is to depopu- 
late it also of its angels, who if they be real enough to be 
persons, must assuredly be real enough to consist of sub- 
stance. Unless always upon the wing, they must likewise 
have a substantial surface whereon to stand. 

107. Lying thus, at the back of the visible and sensible, 
the spiritual world is the universal fountain. Therein are 
contained "the invisible things of God," which are "clearly 
seen by the things that are made." Therein, likewise, are 
contained the "patterns" which were shown to Bezaleel in 
the mount. That history of Bezaleel has wonderful instruc- 
tion in it. What the spiritual world is to the spontaneous, 
objective forms of nature, it is also, we may gather from it, 
to Art, which like those forms, is not an ornament placed 
upon the surface of the world from without, or purely by 
man, but an outbirth from the unseen universe within; just 
as the verdure of the fields is not a carpet laid down and 
spread over them, but an outvegetation of hidden seeds. 
All the men who have been greatest in Art have been dis- 
tinguished by their consciousness that they were merely reve- 
lators of spiritual facts. "Appeal to an artist, and ask him 
why he so painted any given heroic head, without any 
old " family portrait" to guide him. If he be a true artist, 
a race not numerous, he will say, "I could not do otherwise. 
That man had such a temper, such a life, in him. I, there- 
fore, mastermg the inward spirit of the man, found his 



* See, on the grossness of the popular error, its prevalence, and 
its evil tendencies, Barclay's "Inquiry into the Opinions, Ancient 
and Modern, concerning Life and Organization," chap, iii., sec. 
11. (1822.) 



NATUEAL THEOLOGY OF AET. , 181 

fashion and his features created for me and given to me." 
Because such is the ultimate origin of the products of true 
art, of such, that is, as are something more than mere ser- 
vile, tradesmen's copies of familiar physical objects, there is a 
Natural Theology of Art. For Art, rightly understood, is a 
portion of nature- and genuine Natural Theology cannot 
take either part without the other.* Briefly, as the Soul is 
the essential Human Body, so is that grand, invisible, im- 
perishable fabric we call the spiritual, the essential World. 
The spiritual world is the total of Essential nature ; this 
visible, material world is a portion of Representative nature, 
a portion only, because the little planet we call our own is 
the covering of a very minute part indeed of the infinite 
spiritual realm which is its parent. Here we have bxit a 
few detached sketches of the panorama which belongs there, 
and what few we have, albeit they are so lovely, we see but 
" as through a glass, darkly." It will not be so always. 
The spiritual world known to philosophy is no other, as said 
before, than the spiritual world of the hopeful Christian — 
the very same which we shall consciously inhabit when by 
death we cease to be conscious of the present. Our intro- 
duction in this life to miaeral, vegetable, and animal, to 
air, and sky, and sun, is the beginning of a friendship that 
will never be dissolved, only that hereafter we shall view 
things as they really are, instead of their effigies and pic- 
tures. In this world we do not so much live as prepare to 
live, nor enjoy nature's sweet amenities so much a,s prepare 
to enjoy them. We shall leave it, but we shall not lose its 
beauty; we shall learn rather ho,w most thoroughly to de- 
light in it, often turning in pleased remembrance to those 



* Excellently set forth in an article in the North American Ee- 
view for July, 1854, "On the moral significance of the Crystal 
Palace." 
16 



182 EVIDENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 

early days which now we reckon as our " life-time," and to 
that little sphere which was our birth-place and education. 

108. Philo Judseus calls upon us to observe that the deri- 
vation of the physical world from an anterior spiritual world 
is expressly taught in the book of Genesis : " These are the 
generations of the heavens and the earth, . . . and of every 
plant of the field before it was in the earth, and of every 
herb of the field before it grew ;" which words, says Philo, 
" do manifestly teach that before the earth was green, ver- 
dure already existed ; that before the grass sprang in the 
field, there was grass, though it was not visible. The same 
must we understand from Moses in the case of everything 
else which is perceived by the external senses ; there were 
elder forms and motions already existing, according to which 
the others were fashioned and measured out. The things 
which he has mentioned are examples of the nature of all."* 

109. The evidence that there is a spiritual world under- 
lying the material, is quite as ready and plentiful as of the 
material world itself, if men will but look for it in the right 
place, and consent to receive it, for spectacles are less needed 
than willingness. It is rarely that incapacity hinders the 
reception of truth ; rather is it want of cordiality to give it 
welcome. We speak now, of course it wUl be understood, 
of the spiritual world as a truth of Philosophy, *. e., as the 
basis, as to first principles, of terrestrial nature. Most men 
believe in it under the name of " Heaven," or as a country 
which they will enter after death. Few, however, think of 
it in its relation to existing nature ; yet so to regard it is little 
less important to enlarged and encouraging views of Life, 
for it brings heaven into our daily thoughts, as a living, 
familiar, and practical Reality, a thought for the present, for 
the fields and the woods, for the hills and the valleys, instead 



On the Creation, Chap. xliv. 



EVIDENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 183 

of only for tlie future, at church on Sundays, and nothing 
so fills the soul with bright ideas. How differently the 
minds of men are constituted with regard to particular kinds 
of truth, we are perfectly aware. Some are made to super- 
stition, some to enthusiasm, others are inapt for either ; so 
that what in many eases men fancy to be contest for " truth," 
is simply comparison of their mental tastes, just as they 
compare their physical likings over the dining-table, and 
fancy they are contending for what is best. Oftentimes, 
without question, this will account for their insolicitude. 
" Inductive minds," says Whewell, " those which have been 
able to discover laws of nature, have also commonly been 
ready to believe in an Intelligent Author of nature ; while 
deductive minds, those which have employed themselves in 
tracing the consequences of laws discovered by others, have 
been willing to rest in laws without looking beyond to an 
Author of laws." So with the views men take of the 
material world, its substance, derivation, and life. Deduc- 
tive minds are content with the study of matter ; inductive 
minds feel themselves invited to look further. But it is still 
a question of willingness, since nothing is ever sought except 
from the heart. There is something more even than willing- 
ness wanted. Before we can thoroughly recognize and ap- 
prove a truth superior to the region of the senses, our moral 
character must have risen into harmony with it. It follows 
that the spiritual world is not a thing to be argued about. 
We should never argue with a man about things which 
require for their understanding a higher plane than he has 
risen to ; until he has lifted himself into the requisite soul, 
he cannot be expected to see with similar eyes. Show him 
how and where to learn, but do not argue with him till he 
is on a level with your own vision. Hence, too, the utter 
worthlessness of the usual objection to the doctrine of the 
spiritual world, that it has no place in popular systems of 



184 PROOF IN ITS VARIOUS KINDS, 

philosophy. Some men reject it unconditionally — they 
simply " do not believe." It is very convenient to conceal 
incuriousness and ignorance under the name of scepticism, 
and thus invite the community to suppose that superior 
acuteness has detected unsoundness in what actually has 
never been even looked at. 

110. Certainly, the proofs of spiritual things are not of 
the same kiiid as those of material ones. A man must not 
expect the same species of proof that there are angels, as 
of the existence of a railway or a tree. What visible, sen- 
suous proof is to the material, philosophical induction is to 
the spiritual, and when this is assisted and borne out by 
Revelation, it is not merely as good a kind of proof, but an 
incomparably better and more cogent one. Not from the 
substance, time, and space of the material world, is the 
spiritual world to be judged of Like the soul, which is a 
dweller in it, it must be thought of purely from the soul. 
This is the indispensable course in every inquiry that seeks 
to end in something better than grossest materialism. It is 
because people will persist in carrying their material ideas 
with them, wherever they go, that the soul itself has become 
a mere tradition, and the idea of immortality profaned into 
a supposed rebuilding of the rotten carcase of flesh and 
blood. While we should unceasingly strive to be men of 
sense, we should remember that this is not to be simply 
creatures of the senses. The external senses are among 
man's richest inheritances, still are they only the 

Fine steps whereby the Queenly Soul 
Comes down from her bright throne to view the ma.ss 
She hath dominion over. 

The man who attends only to what his senses inform him 
of, imprisons and kills the better half of his nature. He 
may acquire tolerable knowledge of outlines, weights, and 



THE SENSES AND THE IMAGINATION. 185 

colors, but a philosoplier lie can never be. Witb. the dia- 
grams he may become conversant, but not with that sublime 
geometry and universal arithmetic, the constructions of 
which form the real history of nature. The philosophy 
which the outer senses teach, dwells where they do, on the 
surface of nature. Their business is simply with effects. 
Causes, and spiritual things are seen by the internal, poetic, 
seventh sense — that divine faculty which men call the Ima- 
gination, the clear-seeing spiritual eye whereby the loftier 
and inmost truths of the universe, whether they be scientific, 
or religious, or philosophical, can alone be discerned. We 
are apt to suppose that to acquaint ourselves with nature, dili- 
gent observation and experiment will sufiice. Not so. Na- 
ture has secrets which Imagination only can penetrate. So 
grievously has the imagination been perverted — so widely 
has the fancy been mistaken for it — so bad, in consequence, 
is its current repute as to its relation to Truth, that the 
mere mention of it, in connection with the subject in hand, 
will probably provoke many a smile, and in the charitable 
awaken compassion. It will be found, nevertheless, that all 
the. greatest minds the world has produced, in any depart- 
ment of inquiry or of wisdom, have been so by virtue of 
their imagination. The imagination is not, as many sup- 
pose, hostile to truth. " So far from being an enemy to 
truth, the imagination," says Madame de Stael, " helps it 
forward more than any other faculty of the mind." Of 
course there are such things as diseased and prostituted 
imaginations, but the abuse of the faculty is neither its qua- 
lity or design. Imagination rightly so called, presupposes an 
enlarged and tranquil mind, which having in its command 
a wide property in living nature and its laws, steps to un- 
discovered things from the standard of the known. " That," 
says Goethe, " is no true imagination which goes into the 
vague, and devises things that do not exist." Eeason, or to 
16 * 



186 FUNCTIONS OF THE IMAGINATION. 

use a preciser term, common sense, the very arbiter of 
Truth, and imagination, rightly regarded, are each other's 
complement. To esteem them as contrary comes of the very 
same mistake as that which asserts reason and faith to be 
foes. As the perfection of human nature is, in the body, 
the union of strength and beauty, so in the intellect is it the 
union of common sense and imagination. Again deceivihg 
themselves, many suppose that the imagination is constantly 
needing a check. Say rather that it constantly needs the 
spur. Especially is this the case in Science and Religion, 
which instead of having suffered, as it has been taught, from 
excess of imagination, suffer rather from not being as hos- 
pitable to it as they ought. What is idolatry, but inapti- 
tude to rise, on the pinions of the imagination, from the 
symbol to the thing symbolized ? What other than imagi- 
nation is the soul and centre of the very highest act of reli- 
gion, or faith ? To science, to philosophy also, imagination 
is nothing less than pioneer. The Columbus of the human 
mind, imagination opens the way for observation and expe- 
riment, which left to themselves, know not in what direc- 
tion to proceed, and find their way, if at all, slowly and by 
accident ; it provides us with the clue to what we seek, and 
enables us to anticipate the answer we shall receive. Every 
true investigation is the working out of some noble idea of 
the imagination ; no great discovery was ever made without 
employing it. It is the vital characteristic of the Davys, 
the Owens, the Faradays, the Herschels — of all to whom the 
world is indebted for its highest scientific wealth. Genius 
itself might be defined as imagination well directed and well 
regvilated. With all his science, so called, the rm-imagina- 
tive man gives us only the osteology of the rainbow ; it is the 
imaginative or poetic one who delineates its life and beauty. 
Like prisms, the men of imagination convert colorless light 
into exquisite hues ; in their hands does the merest matter 



THE HIGHEST TRUTHS BEYOND PROOF. 187 

of prosaic detail become lustrous and glorified. Witness 
Garth Wilkinson's noble book on the Human Body, "vvhich, 
were it re-written in verse, would be the finest poem in the 
world. Like its subject, it is matter and spirit united, and 
" common sense" from beginning to end. 

111. To attempt, therefore, to prove that there is a spiritual 
world, i. e., in the way that a material or physical thing is 
]Droved, is, after all, superfluous. Those to whom it is inte- 
resting are conscious of it of themselves; and the opposite 
class logic would make no wiser. In a certain sense it is 
above and beyond proof; yet not strangely and peculiarly so. 
Not one of the greatest truths admits of proof commonly so 
called. We feel them. The highest of all, or the conscious- 
ness of God, we ascend into intuitively from our conscious- 
ness of self. That God exists, and that it was he who created 
the world, and who sustains it, we can neither "prove" to 
another, nor have " proved" to ourselves ; and the same with 
the soul, and the spiritual world, and the life to come. For 
what, in fact, is it " to prove," but to trace a subordinate 
proposition up to a higher, or rather, to a primary truth ? 
The nearer that proposition is to God and heaven, the further 
is it away from what is proveable. Were we, in short, to 
refuse to receive anything until "proved," we should remain 
strangers for ever to the noblest and most animating subjects 
of contemplation. Proof, rigid, mathematical proof, belongs 
only to inferior truths, and it is only inferior minds that 
make it the condition of their acceptance. If such minds 
be often characterized by their credulity, they are still 
oftener marked by their mcredulity. "Ignorance is always 
incredulous ; the amplest knowledge has the largest faith." 
It is right, without doubt, to desire proof; it is a man's duty 
to desire it; but then he must remember that many things 
are itnproveable, or rather, that things are proveable in dif- 
ferent ways. The heart and imagination have their eyes as 



188 SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF THE SPIEITUAL WORLD. 

well as the head and the understanding. Great minds, or 
those in which the capacity for reading truth is quickest and 
highest, are not simply " intellectual" minds. They know 
what they have to believe on the showing of the feelings and 
the imagination, and of such things they never demand 
" proof." Not he is the wise man who cunningly thinks to 
take nothing on the word of the imagination, but he who 
takes what nature intends he should. The proof, the essen- 
tial and best proof of the divine origin of Christianity and 
the Bible, does not consist in those weary piles denominated 
the Evidences, historical, archaeological, and so forth, which 
commend themselves only to low and unenviable schools of 
thought, but in its felt adaptation to the needs and aspira- 
tions of the soul. 

112. Scientific considerations may be adduced notwith- 
standing, both in proof of the Spiritual world, and of its 
causative action into the johysical. Why have many ani- 
mals, especially the saurians, the power of reproducing 
amputated members? How is it that when the foot or the 
tail of a lizard is torn off, a new one sprouts in its place ? 
One of two things, either "nature performs a miracle," 
which is an indolent hypothesis ; or else, which is a sufiicient 
and reasonable explanation, material substances mould them- 
selves universally upon preexistent spiritual forms, as upon 
a model, and wait upon them as servitors. The reason 
usually assigned, namely, that the lower we descend in the 
scale of organization, the more is life diffused throughout 
the organism, is correct to a certain point, but it leaves the 
enigma where it was. It is not enough to be told that in 
the lower animals the vital mass which appears as brain in 
the higher kinds, is dispersed. through out the body; and that 
it is owing to this dispersion of the great centre of life into 
many small, separate centres, that the tentacula of polyps, 
the rays of the star-fish, the entire head of the snail, will 



PLANTS IN RELATION TO THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 189 

grow again if cut off. The question still remains — why? 
Life, like any human constructive power, cannot work with- 
out a pattern ; nervous centres are but instrumental.* Why 
the wonderful privilege of replacing lost members of the 
body is enjoyed only by the lower tribes of animals, and not 
by the higher, is that the latter are enabled to make them- 
selves amends for such losses in other ways. The office of 
one limb or member, to an extent sufficient to the necessities 
of life, can, in effect, be executed by another; while man, 
for his part, has the resources of mechanical contrivance in 
addition. The more helpless a creature is, the more amply 
is it always befriended with compensating gifts. 

113. So with plants. Why does the acorn always produce 
an oak, and never an elm or an apple-tree; why the bulb 
of the hyacinth always the verisimilitude of its fragrant 
cluster, and never a cowslip or fleur-de-lis? Simply because 
in the acorn the spiritual substratum of the oak already in 
effect exists ; and in the bulb, in like manner, the spiritual 
form or vegetable soul of the flower. Hence the multifor- 
mity of the beautiful pictures in wood and field, and their 
return to us, year by year. Every wild flower comes back 
in its perfect lineaments; in the early spring the golden 
celandine and the coltsfoot; then the Mayflower and the 
woodruff, then the forget-me-not, bathing its feet at the 
water-side ; and so onwards till the purple crocus of October. 
True, they unfold themselves from roots and seeds, lying 
concentrated as it were till their proper season ; but wanting 
a spiritual form to clothe with stem and leaf, a seed could 



* The power of reproducing lost parts which made that beautiful 
little creature the Hydra such a miracle to first observers, and sug- 
gested its zoological name, appears to exist in scarcely inferior de- 
gree in the Actinias or Sea-anemones. On its prevalence in the Star- 
fishes consult Forbes. 



190 SPIEITUAL FORMS UNDERLYING MATERIAL. 

no more grow than a grain of sand. The real reason of the 
flowers is that every line of beauty in nature is the expres- 
sion of a divine thought, and inherits the immortality of its 
first development in the spiritual world. It is in spiritual 
philosophy, and in this only, that we have an answer also to 
the puzzling question, why it is that the mules, or hybrids, 
both animal and vegetable, cannot permanently produce 
themselves ; why also the graft will only consort with a tree 
of the same species as itself. Material forms may be coupled, 
and a cross be procured for a brief period, but it is impos- 
sible in the same way to establish spiritual forms, and with- 
out these, as their prototypes, material forms cannot be pro- 
pagated. The best introduction to knowledge of what con- 
stitutes a "species," either in Zoology or Botany, is to be 
sought in the jDhilosophy of spirit, and its relation to matter. 

114 So even with inorganic forms. Why do salts and 
metals always crystallize in determinate shapes, their pro- 
portions and angles invariably the same? Let a number of 
difierent salts be dissolved in water, and they will sort 
themselves out, unassisted, and re-adjust and re-crystallize 
their particles in the precise polyhedra they originally pos- 
sessed. Clearly, as in the former case, this is because there 
are underlying spiritual forms, sustained by the Divine life, 
and which, by virtue of that life, draw the particles together, 
each to its own body. The terms chemical afiinity, chemical 
attraction, power, property, agency, vis forniatrix, &c., cur- 
rently used when speaking of the consolidation of inorganic 
matter, denote nothing more than the action of the Divine 
life, under different methods, through the medium of spiritul 
creations in the first place. 

115. On the dim and half-traditional perception that or- 
ganic forms repose upon an interior spiritual form, was built 
the Alchemists' beautiful doctrine of the palingenesis, or 
resuscitation by art, of the spirits of plants and flowers. 



THE alchemist's DOCTRINE OF PALINGENESIS. 191 

" Never," says the historian of the Curiosities of Literature, 
"was a philosophical imagination more beautiful than that 
exquisite palingenesis of the admirable school of Borelli, 
GafFarel, and Digby." The way in which the resuscitation 
was supposed to be brought about, was to burn a flower to 
ashes, and place them in a phial; then to add a certain 
chemical mixture, and warm it; when there would slowly 
rise a delicate apparition of stalk, and leaf, and blossom, 
successively, faithful as the lovely transcripts of scenery in 
still water, "the phantastical plant" disappearing into no- 
thingness as the heat gradually declined. Southey, in the 
second volume of the " Omniana," gives a full account both 
of the doctrine and of the manipulation requisite to pro- 
duce these curious phantoms. That they were actually 
exhibited by the alchemists, there would seem to be no 
doubt ; having been produced, it is not unlikely, by tracing 
the figures of the plants and flowers on the glass reputed to 
contain their spirits, with chloride of cobalt, drawings made 
with which salt are invisible till brought near the fire. So 
firmly was the doctrine held by the honest, that it was 
adduced as an argument for the resurrection of man.* 
Perhaps the Hamadryads of ancient poetry, nymphs who 
were born with trees when they rose out of the ground, who 
lived in them, and who died Avhen they died, were but their 
spiritual forms, separated and personified by fancy. " Trees," 



* Disraeli's account of the Palingenesis is under the head 
"Dreams at the Dawn of Philosophy." On the practical part of it, 
see Boyle's Philosophical Works, abridged, vol. i., p. 69, "Surpris- 
ing things performable by Chemistry," and the Philosophical Trans- 
actions for 1674, vol. ix., p. 175. Palingenesis, as a word, is simply 
tlie Greek for resurrection, learnedly illustrated by Mr. Trench in 
his New Testament Synonymes. Theodore de Eycke applies it to 
the revival of letters, "Oratio de palingenesis Literarum in Terris 
nostris." Leyden, 1672. 



192 MATERIALISM AND SPIRITUALISM. 

says a lively Frenchman, "are animated; they have their 
enjoyments, their grief, their sleep, and their loves. The 
ancients placed a nymph under their rind. To be sure she 
is there-! Life is a very pretty nymph; we ought to love 
her wherever she is found." How beautifully does another 
of the same country allude to his love of trees, and their 
-influence on his imagination, regretting that there are no 
longer any Dryads, or it would have been among these that 
he would have formed an attachment in which his heart 
should find its home.* 

116. In fine, recognition of the spiritual world, as the 
foundation of the material one, and in connection with it, 
of the momentary influx of the Divine life into every ob- 
ject and atom of creation, the spiritual world receiving that 
life primarily, and the material world by derivation from it, 
is the beginning of all genuine philosophy. Unperceiving 
these two great, fundamental truths, the whole kingdom of 
truth is beclouded : only as men learn to appreciate and to 
apply them, does their knowledge begin to live. "What 
but apparitions," says Coleridge, "can belong to a philoso- 
phy which satisfies itself when it can explain nature me- 
eJmnically, that is, by the laws of Death, and brands with 
the name of Mysticism every solution grounded in Life?" 
"As Nature," says Dr. Braun, "without man, presents 
externally only the image of a labyrinth without a clue, 
scientific examination which denies the internal, spiritual 
foundations of nature, leads only to a chaos of unknown 
matters and forces. From this dark chaos no bright path 
leads up." Yet, ordinarily, it is precisely the live facts 
from Avhich men of science turn away! "Nothing is more 
evident," says one of the shrewdest writers of our day, 
" than that the men of facts are afraid of a large number of 



* Eosseau. Confessions, book ix. 



MATERIALISM AND SPIRITUALISM. 193 

important facts. All the spiritual facts about us, of which 
there are plenty, are denounced as superstition. Not only 
are they not received by that courtesy which takes off its 
grave hat to a new beetle or a fresh vegetable alkaloid, but 
they are treated by it worse than our vermin." We do not 
seek to disparage the efforts of the non-spiritual. Whoever 
faithfully explains one of "the things that do appear," 
assists in explaining the hidden and invisible ones which 
are not seen, and deserves approbation and gratitude accord- 
ingly. Let him, with equal courtesy, not undervalue the 
efforts of the "spiritual;" falling into the error of those 
"fools" and "blind" of old, who knew not whether was 
greater, the gold of the temple, or the temple that sanctified 
the gold. The "spiritualist" may seem mad to the material- 
ist, — and mad he is, if merely a spiritualist; but how much 
more sane is the mere man of science, who seeking the living 
among the dead, values the tabernacle more than the occu- 
pying spirit? 

17 • I 



CHAPTER XI 

GMOTTlfnS OF THE VARIOTTS ZEASE OF ZIFJE— Continued. 
CORRESPONDENCE OF NATURE AND MIND. 

117. Correspondence, or the science of the relation of 
the two worlds, i. e., of the objects and phenomena of the 
material, to the typical forms and noumena of the spiritual, 
is the key and Open Sesame! to every species of human 
knowledge. With correspondence for our guide, perhaps 
nothing is absolutely unintelligible ; without it, the com- 
monest things are clouded. To right conceptions of the un- 
seen it is indispensable at the very outset. Most of the 
metaphysical diiiiculties which surround revealed theology, 
really originate in neglecting the light which Correspondence 
is fitted to throw upon them ; the phenomena of the senses 
find in it their only true solution. Vast as nature itself, of 
course it can here be only commended to minds zealous in 
pursuit of genuine wisdom, except in so far as relates to the 
lease of life. 

118. To this end it will sufiice that we consider ihQ parti- 
cular correspondence, derived from the general, which nature 
holds with the faculties and emotions of the Soul, that won- 
derful and delicious concord whereby the sunshine, the sea, 
everything in nature is so comjoanionable, and which gives 
to the soul a kind of omnipresence. The ground of this 
concord is that man, as to first principles, is a synthesis of 
the spiritual world, and thus of the material woiid which 
clothes and represents it. As a concave mirror contains 



NATURE A SECOND HOMO. 195 

pictures in little of all the thousand objects of a beautiful 
landscape, so in the soul of man is contained an epitome of 
all the forces and principles that underlie the works of God, 
whether visible or invisible. The poets and philosophers 
call him a microcosm, ov "little world;" "the kingdom of 
heaven," says holy writ, "is within you." External nature 
is not the independent thing, having no connection with 
man, which we are apt to suppose. It is at once a second 
logos, and a second homo. It is so varied, so lovely, so ex- 
quisitely organized, because of the variety, the loveliness, 
the exquisite composition, primarily of the spiritual world, 
secondly of the human soul. The sun, the stars, trees, 
flowers, the sea, rivers, animals, exist, not irrespectively and 
independently of man, but because of him. In him are all 
of these, along with spring, summer, autumn, and winter, 
light and darkness, heat and cold, all natural objects and 
phenomena whatever, only after another manner, felt instead 
of seen, as sentiments and emotions, instead of physical in- 
carnations. Were they not in him, there would be none of 
them anywhere else. "Had I not had the world in my 
soul from the beginning," says Goethe, "I must ever have 
remained blind with my seeing eyes, and all experience and 
observation would have been dead and unproductive. The 
light is there, and the colors surround us, but if we bore 
nothing corresponding in our own eyes, the outward appa- 
rition would not avail." When, therefore, we admire 
nature, when we love it, it is virtually admiration of the 
spiritual and immortal, and this is why the love of nature is 
so powerful a help towards loving God. Hence also the 
concurrence of Science and Metaphysics, which are con- 
cerned with things essentially the same, only presented under 
different aspects and conditions. So intimate is the corres- 
pondence even between the body of man, and the faculties 
of the soul, that Klencke has built upon it an entire system 



196 THE UNIVERSE A HIEROGLYPH. 

of organic psychology, incited perhaps by the hint of Lord 
Bacon, when he says that " unto all this knowledge of the 
concordances between the mind and the body, that part of 
the inquiry is the most necessary which considereth of the 
seats and domiciles which the several faculties do take and 
occupy." We little think how near, by correspondence, the 
body is like the soul, and the soul like the spiritual world. 
Novalis says truly that " we touch heaven when we lay our 
hand on a human body." Think how the face is the epi- 
tome of the body, repeating in little its every organ and 
every function, and we see why the face is of all natural 
mysteries the very grandest. That plants and animals were 
created, and light and darkness ordained prior to the crea- 
tion of man, is no objection to their being effects or results 
of him, because although the last to be actually moulded, 
he was the first in conception and plan, all the works of 
Almighty wisdom being prefigurative of His own image and 
likness. 

119. It is no new doctrine that such a concord or corres- 
pondence exists between nature and the soul of man ; it is 
no new discovery ; neither is it a deduction from any new or 
narrow circle of experiences. " The world at large is the 
school that believes in it, and daily life, in all its immense 
detail, is the theatre of its exemplification." Language 
rests entirely upon the sublime fact that the universe is a 
hieroglyph and metaphor of human nature; there is no 
poetry that has not sprung from the deep feeling of it, and 
that does not owe to it all its eloquence and graces ; all 
philosophy implies and unconsciously proclaims it; the 
magic, idolatry, and mythology of the primsevals ; the 
" language of flowers," emblems, fable, allegory, the rites 
and ceremonies of religion, are all founded upon it, and are 
alone explicable by it. It is no less the ground of our most 
living enjoyments. The sweetness of a kind look, the solace 



COREESPONDENCE THE GROUND OF FRIENDSHIP. 197 

of a loving smile, come purely of the correspondence of the 
features with the soul within ; the pleasure we derive from 
music, scenery, flowers, comes of our feeling, when in their 
presence, the " sweet sense of kindred." The light of the 
soul, like the light of the sun, makes everything beautiful 
on which it shines, but it is by being reflected from it. As 
we can only give to others what they can take, so can we 
only be affected by what is congenerous to ourselves — ^the 
secret of all loves, friendships, and social unions. The in- 
most spring of our attachments to one another is our Cor- 
respondence. Hence, too, that beautiful innate image in 
the heart of the beings we most deeply and permanently 
love, which gives to our first sight of them almost a sense 
of recognition. 

Some are never strangers, 
But soon as seen, the soul as if by instinct 
Springs towards them with resistless force, and owns 
Congenial sympathy. 

120. Save for the unity of the mind with the inmost, 
sjiiritual essence of the world, nature would not only be in- 
comprehensible to man — not only be no object of his intelli- 
gence, but not even an object of his consciousness. Only 
by virtue of our correspondence with nature do we become 
familiar with it. There can be no reciprocation where there 
is no similarity. Were it not a mirror, it would be a void, 
as to the brutes it really is, since they see it not, and feel it 
not. Not that there is any of our proper life in the things 
of nature. They are instinct with spiritual vitality, but 
only in man is spiritual vitality exalted into spiritual Life, 
since he alone is intelligent of God. Doubtless there is 
great diversity in men's estimate and appreciation of natural 
objects, and thence in the pleasure derived from them, but 
this so much the more substantiates the principle. Why 
17* 



198 CORRESPONDENCE A MORAL AGENT. 

some minds are most delighted by flowers, others by birds, 
others by mountains, others by trees, even by particular 
species of living things, as when one loves above all other 
birds the industrious, sociable rooks, it is that the corre- 
spondent spiritual principles are in- those minds preeminently 
developed. The whole of nature is in every mind, but some 
one part of it more actively than the remainder; while all 
men are joint heritors of the total of the world, every man 
has a little piece of it to himself Every man has a secret 
affinity, a secret love, a secret pleasure, known in its iullness 
and rewards, like his conscience, only to himself and to his 
Maker. Were we wise, this great principle would be made 
the basis of Education, which should never fail to respect 
the correspondences of individual minds, and cannot be ex- 
pected to be efficient till it is recognized. The efficacy of 
correspondence is truly wonderful. While new feelings are 
awakened, old, familiar ones are heightened and improved 
by the presence of the natural object that represents them. 
Beneath the still skies of night we become more reverent ; 
looking at the green leaves of spring, more young in hope. 
Why do the tenderly-attached find such happy hours in 
sweet, sequestered, rural pathways, where the wild flowers 
blow, and the clear streams ripple, if it be not that nature 
mirrors and echoes their affections, and enriches them with 
a new enthusiasm ? Hence it is also that those who love 
tenderly always feel peculiarly endeared to one another 
while participating in the admiration of works of Art, 
which, fulfilling the highest end of Art, namely, to excite 
emotions, and not merely awaken recollection, speak to the 
soul by their true grandeur. A chief reason why so much 
originally good feeling becomes chilled and debased, is that 
we do not oftener quit the world that man has made, for the 
company of our kindred in the world that God made. Im- 
muring ourselves in the narrow boundary of our parlors, 



SIGNIFICANCE OF EXTERNAL NATURE. 199 

we cannot properly expand ; " in the presence of nature we 
feel great and free, like that which we have before our eyes." 
Things again, which away from their correspondent imagery 
seem weak and trifling, in its presence become beautiful and 
noble. " Love-scenes," says an amiable writer, " such as in 
a parlor look foolish and absurd, assume a very different 
aspect when seen amid the soft hush and spiritual beauties 
of an evening river-side, or in the light of an autumn moon. 
We feel then that the beautifiil picture has received its 
proper setting. Who has forgotten the moonlight scene in 
the Merchant of Venice, or the interview of Waverley and 
Flora near the waterfall ?" Lastly, it is in the convergence 
towards him of all its nature and attributes, that the 
thoughtful man finds the dignity of the world consist. " He 
reads the mystery of human existence in the relations of 
the forms which encompass him ; and discovers the solution 
of nature's problems in his own physical and mental activi- 
ties." He sees that it is the same life which connects events 
and phenomena, whether ia him or without him, and with 
the change from terrestrial to human, finds it glorify. 

121. External nature being then what we find it, by vir- 
tue of previous ideas and affections in the world of spirit, 
and of its synthesis, the human soul, the phenomena, 
changes, and vicissitudes which take place in it, will be so 
many correspondences and translations of what occurs i/iere. 
Here, accordingly is the first solution of the problem of the 
lease of life. Why the oak and the elephant live so long ; 
why the gourd and the insect die so soon, is that the princi- 
ples, sentiments, and emotions in the human soul to which 
these things severally correspond, are of the same relative 
constitution and capacity of endurance. How many are the 
emotions which we feel, year by year, growing and strength- 
ening within us, like noble trees ; how many others do we 
feel spring up, blossom, and pass away like the day-lily ! 



200 THE LAW OF USE. 

The whole matter of the "growth of the mmd" is translata- 
ble into the history of the growth of nature, its changes, de- 
cays, and rejuvenescences. What is longseval in the soul, is 
longseval also in nature ; what is ephemeral in the world, is 
the picture of something ephemeral in ourselves. 

122. The law of Use, wherein consists the second grand 
cause of the diversity in the lease of life, is like Correspond- 
ence, vast as creation itself, seeing that subserviency to an- 
other's wants and happiness is the purpose for which all 
things have been designed, and the world framed and me- 
thodized so admirably. The greater the amount of the dif- 
ference between any two or more objects, the stronger is the 
proof of their necessity as regards the general welfare, and 
thus of their having some special use in their respective 
spheres, whether we can perceive the exact nature of it or 
not. The difference, for example, between an elephant and a 
rose, and between a rose and a pebble, is the precise measure 
of their value and importance in the collective economy and 
constitution of things. Wherein these two qualities consist, 
of course is a separate matter of inquiry, and falls to the 
province of the accurate observer of nature. 

123. All uses are referable to one or other of three great 
ends ; they were designed for these ends, and they are per- 
petually promotive of them. The first is the physical wel- 
fare of the living organisms of our planet ; the second, the 
instruction and delight of man; the third, which presupposes 
and ensues upon the other two, is the glory of God who or- 
dained them, and for whose "pleasure" all things were cre- 
ated. Physical uses comprise all those by which things 
reciprocally sustain one another in health and comeliness, 
and preserve their respective races extant upon the earth. 
The soil supports the plant; the plant feeds the animal; 
both repay all that is rendered them, and with interest; and 
strengthened by what they have received, succor their own 



DEATH NEEDFUL TO HUMAN HAPPINESS. 201 

species. According to tlie needs of each superior thing is 
the adaptation of every inferior one that supports it, as re- 
gards structure, configuration, and vital economy; every 
plant and animal, every bird and tree, every mineral even, 
is so constituted as to enable it to minister to a nobler na- 
ture ; the term of its life is exactly adequate and proportion- 
ate to its office, and concludes when the duties of that office 
have been fulfilled. The tree that provides timber lives for 
centuries ; the corn required for food is ripe in a summer. 

124. Nature ministers to the instruction and delight of 
man by shadowing intellectual and religious truth ; and this 
great use it most efficiently subserves in the circumstance 
of its incessant change. Change, at least in the material 
world, implies death ; and death, for its full efficacy and im- 
pressiveness as a monitor, needs to be various and wonderful 
as life. Were there no such thing as external nature, man 
would be an irremediably ignorant savage ; he becomes ci- 
vilized and intelligent by the just contemplation of its mys- 
teries. Nature is the grand, rich book of symbols which we 
prove it, not simply in the significance of its forms, but in 
the significance and lessons of the phenomena of its mortal- 
ity. Were all things like the granite mountain-peaks, that 
have caught the first beams of immemorial morning suns, 
enduring forever, though we might wonder more, our love 
and true spiritual activity would be less. The very frailty 
of things excites a tender interest in them, and when to this 
is joined an almost endless diversity as to the period of their 
stay, they become to us store-houses of curious wisdom and 
satisfaction. Where would be the gladness of the spring if 
the primroses blossomed throughout the year, or the gran- 
deur of the ancient woods if the trees were but children of 
the summer? Man is a thousand times happier from the 
fact of some plants being annuals, others perennials, others 
longseval trees, than were all to die at a common age. 

I* i 



202 DEATH A BENEFICENT ORDINATION. 

125. Finally is the use of all things in reference to the 
glory of their Almighty Franaer ; and this, as in the pre- 
ceding case, is exalted by what to a small and narrow view, 
is their very weakness. Why the mass of organic nature is 
so brief-lived, why it seems to exist only to die, is that, 
taking a thousand years together, the amount of enjoyment 
(or of picturesque on the part of what is not competent to 
enjoy), shall be greater than were it to survive for the whole 
period. The larger the number of beings that enter the 
world, whether by fertility of individuals, or by successive 
renewals, one generation after another, so much the more 
scope is there for that happiness and physical beauty which 
it is the Divine "pleasure" to communicate and sustain. 
Doubtless, a solitary tree, a single animal of each kind, or 
of any kind, attests the hand of God as powerfully as a 
world-full, and a single generation as powerfully as a hun- 
dred ; but God is essential Love, and the nature of love is 
to give ; its satisfaction is to surround itself with receptacles 
for the blessings which it burns to bestow, and in a finite 
kingdom such receptacles are best multiplied — ^perhaps only 
80 — by the magnificent institutions of Death and Renewal, 
whereby myriads are successively introduced upon the scene, 
instead of a few antique and venerable ones remaining al- 
ways. It is infinitely more to the glory of God that ten 
men should live for seventy years a-piece, one after another, 
than that there should be only one instead of ten in the 
same period. It makes ten happy lives instead of only one, 
for seventy years properly used, are as good as seven hun- 
dred. In a word, whatever advantage it is to man's wel- 
fare, either physical or moral, that the lease of life should 
be various, is also a glory to God, because all human en- 
lightenment and delight shine back upon the heaven of 
their origin. 

126. A question yet remains in connection with this sub- 



LEASES OE EXTINCT ANIMALS AND PLANTS. 203 

ject, namely, — Let the maximum duration of the individuals 
constituting a species be what it may, — a few months or a 
thousand years, — does a period arrive in the history of the 
species when, like a title of nobility without an heir, it abso- 
lutely "dies out," every individual becoming extinct? Geo- 
logy makes it plain that during the infinite past, species of 
animals and plants now no longer existing, successively 
occupied the surface of the earth, in considerable variety 
and amazing numbers; the legitimate conclusion is, there- 
fore, in favor of the afiirmative. How long the particular 
species now alive have been upon the earth, how long they 
will continue, man can neither know nor surmise; it is suf- 
ficient for the principle that they can be shown to have had 
predecessors, and that those predecessors have wholly dis- 
appeared from the ranks of the living. The highest interest 
attaches to the existing organic population of the world, 
both as to its beginning and its final destiny. The origin of 
noxious plants and animals; the descent of the various 
races from a single individual or a single pair of each kind, 
or on the other hand, from a plurality ; their dispersion over 
the earth's surface ; the extermination of different species by 
the hand of man ; and many similar matters, treated as they 
deserve, would sufiice to fill whole volumes. Here they 
must be dismissed with the bare mention. 

127. The general question as to the lease of life in species 
being answered, there arise upon the solution other and more 
curious problems : — What were the leases of those anterior 
species? — Why have they not continued to the present time? 
— ^Under what laws were the new and superseding forms in- 
troduced? Geology solves them in part, or as regards the 
proximate, physical reasons; and no portion of this noble 
science is more interesting and satisfactory. But Geology of 
itself is insufficient; we are compelled to fall back, as in 
everything else, on the spiritual laws of which physical ones 



204 THE PRE-ADAMITE "WORLD, 

are Effects. Then we find that the same laws which pri- 
marily determine the duration of the individuals of a 
species, determine also the duration of the species as a whole. 
They are problems no less magnificent than vast, if only 
from the immensity of time covered by the events and 
changes they have reference to. Six thousand years, or 
thereabout, the period we are accustomed to regard as com- 
prising the history of life, and as taking us to the beginning 
of creation, is in reality but the pathway to a point from 
which we look forth on an expanse without horizon. Yet 
not hopelessly, because with all the sublime antiquity in the 
works of the Almighty, stretching so far back, and upon a 
scale so grand, there is indissolubly connected the fact of his 
Unchangeableness, assuring us that he was always employed 
as now; that we shall find all in perfect harmony; that all 
that exists, as worlds, systems of worlds, contents of worlds, 
to-day, is but a continued exemplification of original and 
eternal principles; thus that all lies within the reach and 
compass of our understanding. 

128. The spiritual laws alluded to are again those of 
Correspondence and of Use, which apply to the ante-hominal 
world no less than to the existing state of things. The pre- 
Adamite plants and animals, like those which now surround 
us, were material shows of forms contained in the spiritual 
world, flowing from them in the same manner, and possessed 
therefore of similar affinities with principles and affections 
in the soul of man, which is the spiritual world in little. 
For though later in production, as to time, man virtually 
and essentially preceded every Spirifer and Trilobite, every 
Coralline and Conferva. Prior to all worlds, man is the 
oldest idea in creation ; nothing was ever moulded into form, 
or vitalized by the Divine breath, that had not a prefigura- 
tive reference to something eventually to be exhibited in 
hivi. The geological history of our planet is the biography 



GEOLOaY AND PSYCHOLOGY. 205 

of human nature, told in the imagery of correspondence; 
all those great phenomena of stratification, disruption, 
change of surface, and succession of living being, which 
make the annals of our earth such glorious reading, are to 
the true reader a narrative in symbol of his own emotional 
and intellectual development. From the time when darkness 
was upon the face of the deep, through all the grand sequences 
of light, land and water, vegetation and animal life, the 
record is of man's advance from the state of vacant infancy 
up to that of ripe and opulent maturity. Did we know 
the particular correspondence of the extinct plants and ani- 
mals that once lived upon the earth, we should discern in 
every one of them a picture of something in the mind or 
heart of childhood ; we should comprehend the scheme of 
sequence in which they successively appeared, the ground of 
their various duration, why they were of such and such 
figure, habits, and degree of bulk. The great size of many 
of the pre-Adamite animals, and their strange and unshapely 
forms, consist, we may see at a glance, with the wild, am- 
bitious phantasies of early youth, when the Arabian Nights 
are thought to be solid facts; — the small number of distinct 
species, relatively to the present numbers, corresponds with 
its scanty stock of emotional exjoeriences and ideas. Who 
is there that, wandering through the museums of memory, 
is not reminded of the time when the plains of his little 
world were trod by gigantic Mastodons and Dimotheria, and 
when in place of its now innumerable flowers and fruit-trees, 
there were only huge Calamites and Sigillarias. Thus will 
it be that Correspondence, in the ratio that men study this 
matchless science, will throw light on the history of the fossil 
fauna and flora of our globe. Its companion law, the great 
principle of Use, rightly brought to bear, will supply what 
more is wanting. For all these ancient forms of life had 
their uses to subserve, and doubtless their respective leases 

IS 



206 LEASES COMMENSURATE WITH USES. 

were adapted to them. The plants, for example, whose 
compacted and bitumenized relics constitute Coal, must have 
been gifted with a duration and a prolific power commen- 
surate with the use they were destined to in the remote 
fature; and the magazines once filled and covered in they 
would cease from living occupancy of the soil. 



CHAPTER XII. 

XHE SPiniTUJiL EXPRESSION OF EIFE,— NATURE AND 
SEAT OF THE SOUL. 

129. The spiritual expression of life is the prerogative of 
MAN. It is the gift which distinguishes him from all other 
animals; just as the organic life is that which distinguishes 
those animals, together with plants, and his own material 
body, from earth and stone. By virtue of his spiritual life, 
man is an emotional and intellectual being. By virtue of 
this he thinks, speaks, sings,* worships, loves, pities, weeps,t 
hopes, laughs, marries ; performs, in a word, the innumerable 
actions, internal and external, which the observation of 
thousands of years has never once detected in any of the in- 
ferior orders of creation, but has established as the noble 
diagnosis of human nature. This also is the primary ground 
of his physical peculiarities. By virtue of his possessing a 
Soul, animated with spiritual life, the spine of man has those 
wonderful curves ia it, and that curious pyramidal arrange- 
ment of bones, whereby he is enabled to stand erect. The 
more complicated brain than any other of the mammalia 
have; the smoothness and nakedness of his skin; the pecu- 
liar muscle for the extension of the fore-finger; the capacity 
for being tickled, and for blushing ; smiles and kisses ; the 



* Birds only whistle ; they do not sing. 

f The occasional flow of a few tears from the eyes of certain quad- 
rupeds, is not weeping, the true idea of which implies intelligent 
emotion, and strength rather than weakness. 

207 



208 THREE DEGREES OF LIFE IN MAN. 

breast of woman, so exquisitely unlike that of any other 
female animal, both in its shape during the flower of her 
age, and the longer retention of its normal form after the 
period of lactation; all these have their essential origin in 
that inner and regal life which links earth to heaven. 
Flowing from God cotemporaneously, the spiritual and the 
organic life are the same in essence, the difference between 
them is simply one of expression. As played forth by the 
body, it is Organic life; as played forth by the soul, it is 
Spiritual life. Man, while a resident in the material world, 
is a recipient, therefore, not merely of one, nor even of two, 
but of three expressions of the Divine sustaining energy. 
Chemical affinity, cohesion, molecular attraction, &c., which 
are its lowest expression, sustain the elemental ingredients 
of his frame, the carbon, water, lime, and so forth. Organic 
life arranges and builds up those ingredients into apparatus, 
and impels the several portions to the due performance of 
some fixed duty. Spiritual life, which is the highest expres- 
sion, vitalizes and energizes his soul ; impelling it, after the 
same manner, to the exercise of its intellect and affections. 
The knowledge of the lowest expression of life constitutes 
Phj^sics; that of the organic, Physiology; that of the highest 
or spiritual, Psychology. The latter may be defined as the 
science of the Life of God in man's soul; physiology as that 
of the Life of God in his body. And as that life is essen- 
tially One, psychology and physiology, in their high, philo- 
sophic idea, are connected as soul and body, and each is an 
exponent of the other. AVhat in relation to physiological 
life, are called the "functions of the body," or the "functions 
of organization," re-appear in relation to the spiritual life, 
as the " intellectual powers," the " operations of the mind," 
&c., which are the same thing essentially, only expressed 
after a higher manner, according to the law of discrete de- 
grees. Functions in the body, faculties in the soul; the 



NATURE AND SEAT OF THE SOUL. 209 

terms alter as the theatre changes. Doubtless there are 
broad distinctions in the mode of their procession. The 
phenomena of which physiology takes cognizance are both 
simultaneous and successive ; those which belong to psycho- 
logy are successive only. "Physiological phenomena ex- 
hibit themselves as an immense number of series bound up 
together; psychological phenomena as but a single series. 
Thus, the continuous actions of digestion, circulation, respi- 
ration, &c., are also ^jnehronous; but the actions constituting 
Thought occur, not simultaneously, but one after another." 
Taken together, physiology and psychology meet as Philo- 
sophy, or the science of the antecedent unity of which the 
spiritual and the material are the dual development. 

130. The spiritual expression of life is a perfectly distinct 
thing from the soul; which is no mere "principle," either of 
intelligence as regards this world, or of immortality as 
regards the next; but a definite, substantial entity, as much 
a part of created nature as a flower or a bird ; and so far 
from being Life, or even possessing any inherent or separate 
life, depends for existence, no less than the body which en- 
closes it, on continually renewed supplies from the Creator. 
" The inner man drops into metaphysical dust, as the outer 
man into physical, unless the parts be kept in coherence by 
some sustainmg life; and that latter is no other than the 
life of the living God." In itself, the soul is neither immor- 
tal nor indestructible. However common such epithets may 
be in books and sermons, the Bible knows nothing of them ; 
though it unquestionably teaches that God having once 
created a soul, it pleases him to sustain it with life for ever ; 
and to allow it to exercise that life freely, as if it were its 
own, just as the free exercise of the organic life is allowed to 
the body. The possession respectively of independent life 
and of derived life, constitutes the grand characteristic by 
which we distinguish at all times and in all places, between 

18* 



210 POPULAR IDEAS CONCERNING THE SOUL, 

the Creator and the created. If not a generally-received 
distinction, even among philosophers, that the soul is one 
thing and its life another is at least the doctrine of the New 
Testament, where the Divine, vitalizing essence is discrimi- 
nated as Q(D'f], while the vessel into which it is communicated 
is called by some such name as (pw/^fj. Thus, 7iveu[ia ^cor^t; 
ix zoo dedo dayjXdev iv auTde(;, "the spirit of life from 
God entered into them;" (Rev. xi. 11,) ra^ <p^X'^'^ "^^^ 
7ZS7re?.£xicrfj.sua)u, "the souls of them that were beheaded.'' 
(Rev. XX. 4.) The body is distinguished as acojua, as in 
Matthew x. 28, "Fear not them which kill to acofxa, 
but are not able to kill rrjv (pu-jrqv, but rather fear Him 
who is able to destroy both (puy^-f] and aoifjia in hell." 

131. Rightly to conceive of the spiritual life, it is needful, 
accordingly, first to obtain clear ideas of its receptacle, the 
soul; just as in order to the conception of physiological life, 
it is needful first to inquire into the composition of the body. 
If we are to judge by the loose, indefinite notions ordinarily 
entertained respecting the soul, even by intelligent people, a 
positive, coherent idea of it is one of the greatest desiderata 
of the age. How common is it to hear the soul alluded to 
as a mere abstract intellection; an ethereal, unimaginable, 
immortal something, located nobody knows where, but sur- 
mised to be in the brain, and capable of subsisting, in the 
ti'ans-sepulchral world, in the most independent and isolated 
condition, free from any kind of connection Avith any kind 
of body. This is not philosophical, to say the least of it. 
Granted, the nature of the soul is a mystery ; a mystery, too, 
of Avhich all the most grand and sacred part futurity alone 
can reveal. We shall compass it when, and not before, our 
"eyes behold the King in his beauty," Him who is "the end 
of problems and the font of certainties." We should be 
thankful, indeed, that we feel it to be a mystery, for the 
mind that repudiates or is insensible to the mysterious, is in- 



KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOUL ATTAINABLE. 211 

accessible to the sublime. But to be mysterious is not neces- 
sarily to be inscrutable. The prime feature of mystery is 
that it recedes before wise and calm interrogation. Mystery, 
therefore, should never be allowed to deter. It ought rather 
to incite, especially when, as in the present instance, Keve- 
lation stands ready to shed its clear and willing light, and 
assures us that to the earnest disciples of truth "it is given 
to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven," of which 
the Soul is indisputably one of the sublimest. "It is the 
essential mark of the true philosopher," says Coleridge, "to 
rest satisfied with no imperfect understanding, so long as the 
impossibility of attaining a fuller knowledge has not been 
demonstrated." While we reverently attempt not to be 
" wise above that which is written," one of our highest duties 
is to strive, and that most studiously, to be wise "ujj to that 
which is written." The reward is abundant, if we do but 
discover the nature of the difficulties, and what is within, 
and what beyond, the scope of our powers. 

132. That a most partial and defective interpretation of 
the mystery is all that purely secular philosophy can 
achieve, may be as readily conceded as the enigmatical 
character of the theme itself; and recognizing this, it is no 
matter of surprise that Pagan antiquity bequeathed to us 
nothing but a mass of shapeless and contradictory hypothe- 
ses. The ancients' ignorance of physiology was likewise a 
serious, perhaps fatal, impediment.* That a people claim- 
ing to be enlightened Christians, in a country like England, 
should not hold a single fixed and positive opinion on the 



* Anaximenes taught that the soul was nothing more than air. 
Socrates, in the Phsedo, jocosely remarks to the disciples of this 
doctrine, that surely their souls will be run away with by the wind, 
when they die, if of no better composition, and warns them against 
residing in an open and windy country ! 



212 NO ESTABLISHED DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL. 

nature of the soul, to say nothing of an established doctrine, 
is, however, truly astonishing, and not a little reproachful. 
An exalted theology, like a sound philosophy, never rests 
content with general, indefinite ideas. It avails nothing to 
know the ancients' deficiencies if we are careless about our 
own. Only by making the detection of their errors the 
means of true knowledge for ourselves, do we acquire a 
right to pity the ignorance of our predecessors, and to lay 
claim to an enlightenment which they had not One would 
think that though no one else cared to do it, those at least 
whose entire solicitude is presumed to have reference to the 
soul, and whose studies and occupation so peculiarly qualify 
them, namely, the priests and ministers of religion, would 
never rest till they had enabled themselves to propound 
something intelligible and satisfactory. So far from it, the 
pulpit is mute, and its companion literature is barren.* 
Affirmations of the general fact of immortality are plentiful 
enough, we are aware. But this is not the question, nor is 
it a question at all. No one from his heart disputes the 
general proposition of immortality; and it is notorious that 
even those who affect to deny it with their lips, confess it in 
their fears. The belief in immortality is a natural feeling, 
an adjunct of self-consciousness, rather than a dogma of 
any particular theology, or of any particular age or country, 
and is concurrent with the belief in an Infinite, presiding 
Spirit, which is allowed to be spontaneous and universal. 
What we want to be instructed in is, not that man is im- 
mortal, but what the Soul is; and this not so much as 
regards our future, as our present existence. This is the 



* With the exception of the Eev. J. Clowes' " Letters to a friend 
on the Human Soul, as being a Form and Substance deriving its 
life continually from God," 1825, and the excellent little work of 
the Eev. W. Mason " On the Human Soul." 



THE SOUL OF MAN A SPIRITUAL BODY. 213 

knowledge with regard to which intelligent curiosity seems 
dead, and which is so beclouded by error, yet which even 
the pulpit takes no trouble to purify and correct, and place 
before the world in its proper, illustrious beauty; as if it 
were quite unimportant that what is philosophically false 
can never be theologically true. 

133. The soul of man, considered in its true character, 
namely, the seat and immediate organ of his emotional and 
intellectual life, is his spiritual body. The body of flesh 
and blood is only half the human being. Another body 
underlies it. " There is a natural body," says the Apostle, 
" and there is a spiritual body." By " spiritual body" he 
plainly means a body altogether different from the "natural," 
which is the material, or as Wiclif calls it, the " beestli" 
body ; yet by speaking of both in the present tense — saying 
of each that it now is — he gives us to understand that the 
two bodies are cotemporaneous and co-existent, so long, that 
is, as the natural one may endure. By adding that it is to 
be " raised," he intimates that this " spiritual body" is the 
immortal portion of our being.* In this glorious revelation 



* It is scarcely necessary to point out to the intelligent reader that 
the "it" in the English translation of these verses does not and 
cannot mean the dead material body, but man as to his personality, 
or consciousness of himself. He knows himself as "a natural body" 
while in this world ; as "a spiritual body" in the next. TJiis is 
proved by the word " sown," which refers, not as' careless readers 
suppose, to the interment of one's corpse in the grave, but to the 
birth of our living into the world. " The time," says Locke, " that 
man is in this world, affixed to this earth, is his being sown, and not 
when, being dead, he is put in the grave, as is evident from St. 
Paul's own words. For dead things are not sown ; seeds are sown, 
being alive, and die not till after they are sown." &c. Paraphrase 
and Notes on the Epistles, Works, vol. 3, p. 207. Ed. 1714. We shall 
see this more plainly in a future chapter. 



214 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 

is thus furnished the " key to the mystery ;" for everything 
which philosophy asserts to be constitutional to the soul is 
involved in the idea of a spiritual body, of a nature superior 
to the material one, and continuing to exist after that body 
expires ; and conversely, everything which is said by the 
Apostle concerning the spiritual body, is exactly what we 
should expect from an inspired writer, seeking to communi- 
cate a general notion of the soul and its destiny. But so 
far we have little more than a substitution of one name for 
another. What w this " spiritual body?" Here historical 
Scripture comes to our aid. It is an admirable character- 
istic of the Bible that there is not a single doctrine enunci- 
ated in its didactic portions, but is somewhere illustrated in 
its histories; either in the actual histories, includiug the 
biographical notices, or in the ^wasi-histories, as the para- 
bles. Take, for instance, the history of the Transfiguration. 
During its progress, there were seen by the disciples, 
dudpsi; duo, " two 7ne7i, which were Moses and Elias, who 
appeared in glory." The event in question took place more 
than eighteen hundred years ago ; the bodies, therefore, in 
which the patriarchs appeared, could not have been the 
resuscitated and transformed material bodies which it is 
commonly supposed will be re-attached to the soul at the 
day of judgment, "when the graves are opened, and the sea 
gives up her dead." They must, nevertheless, have been 
real and substantial bodies, or they would not have been 
identified as Moses and Elias by spectators, who it is ex- 
pressly stated, were " awake." Elias (or Elijah) certainly 
is stated, in another place, to have been taken up into 
heaven by " a chariot and horses of fire ;" but to the en- 
lightened reader of the Word of God, it is evident that he 
did not go as flesh and blood, seeing that these " cannot in- 
herit the kingdom of heaven ;" and in any case there is no 
authority for supposing Moses to have gone in such a form. 



LAZARUS AND THE RICH MAN". 215 

So in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Here too 
the several actors are represented as being perfectly well 
known to one another, and as holding the perfect human 
form, implied in their possessing the customary corporeal 
organs. The time of this parable is laid, it will be remem- 
bered, as prior to the " day of judgment" and the " resur- 
rection of the body," as popularly thought of (suggesting, 
by the way, an enormous discrepancy between the popular 
notions and the doctrine of the parable), the rich man's 
father and brethren being still alive upon the earth. Here 
again, therefore, there is no material .body present ; nothing 
but the soul; yet all the circumstances of the narrative 
imply bodies no less real, and no less truly organized and 
sensitive. What, then, is the inference to be drawn from 
these facts and divine teachings ? Clearly this ; that what 
is popularly called the " soul" is what the Apostle terms the 
" spiritual body ;" and that the latter is a substantial, organ- 
ized form, exactly correspondent with the external, physical 
frame; that it presents a precisely similar assemblage of 
parts and features ; and that when disengaged from it at 
death, it still holds intact both the human configuration, and 
every lineament on which personal identity depends, and by 
which individuals are recognized and distinguished from one 
another. Thus that the soul is no "will-o'-th'-wisp in the 
swamps of the cerebrum," but an internal man; a body 
within a body; "a life," as Aretseus says of the womb, 
"within a life;" in the material body as God is in the uni- 
verse — everywhere and nowhere; everywhere for the en- 
lightened intellect, nowhere for the physical view; no more 
in the brain than in the toes, but the spiritual " double" of 
the entire fabric. All the organs of the material body have 
soul in them, and serve the soul, each one according to its 
capacity, yet is the soul itself independent of them all, 
because made of another substance. "And though it fill 



216 man's body a series of bodies. 

the whole body, yet it taketh up no room in the body; and 
if the body decrease, if any member be cut off or wither, 
the soul is not diminished, only ceaseth to be in that mem- 
ber it was before, and that without any hurt or blemish to 
itself."* A beautiful image of their interconnection is sup- 
plied in the structure of hones, which consist of inanimate 
earthy matter, and living gelatine, so intimately incorpo- 
rated that although the parts are really two, the seeming is 
of only one, atom answering to atom so completely that the 
whole of the earthy matter may be dissolved away by acid, 
or the whole of the gelatinous matter be burned by calcina- 
tion, and yet the form of the bone remain entire. The inner, 
spiritual body is represented in the gelatine ; the outer, 
material one in the earthy matter. 

134. It may assist us to form an idea of the spiritual 
body, if we consider the various parts and systems of organs 
of which the outer or material body is constructed. Man is 
in reality a series of human forms, one wrapped within the 
other, and successively more perfect and complete as we ap- 
proach the seat of his highest powers. Begin with the ske- 
leton. In this we have the rude image of a man, correct as 
far as it goes, showing his bulk, his stature, his general out- 
line. It is a skeleton, we may remark in passing, distinctly 
and absolutely human. No single bone of it exactly agrees 
Avith a bone of any other animal whatever. Next take the 
muscles. Separate these, and we again have a man, more 
perfect and substantial than the former, but still only an 
approach to the true idea, wanting the fullness of contour. 
Then take the veins. Here is a human figure again ; a 
drawing of the venous and arterial system includes the 
whole area of the body. Taking, however, lastly, the brain 
and nerves, we have a much closer resemblance. If every 



* Psychosophia, by N. Mosley, p. 18. 1653. 



GHOST-BELIEF. 217 

nervous thread could be extracted and exhibited in its natu- 
ral position, the perfect human outline would be delineated. 
These several elementary structures, the skeleton, the mus- 
cles, the veins, the nerves, woven and interlaced together, 
form in their total the material body, the skeleton being 
least like the total, the nervous system the most like it. 
The Spiritual body lies within again, but higher and more 
exquisite in every circumstance and particular ; formed, not 
of material substance, but of spiritual ; invisible therefore, 
and intangible, except to organs formed of substance similar 
to its own. What the skeleton is to the muscles, what the 
muscles are to the veins, what the veins are to the nerves, 
what all these together are to the man in his full physical 
integrity, as the continent of the whole, such is the material 
body in its totality to the spiritual. Hence, if we want to 
see what the soul is like, instead of taking a microscope, or 
an Essay on Immortality, all we have to do is to contem- 
plate the living and moving beauty of a human figure in its 
ripeness and perfection. The true elxwv ^o.athxq is the 
human body. 

135. That the soul or spiritual body is a form in exact 
correspondence with the external, material body; that it 
presents a similar assemblage of parts and features; and 
that it undergoes no change in these respects when it casts 
off the material envelope, and enters the eternal world — un- 
less to acquire infinite access of beauty or distortion, accord- 
ing to its governing principle of conduct, good or evil — is 
involved in ghost-heliej; a belief which, when rightly directed, 
has infinitely more truth in it than the dogmatic nonsense 
which describes the soul as a mere " principle." How often 
do we find men's actual, secret faith, ahead of their spoken 
Creeds and Articles ! The former comes of the truth-telling 
intuitions of the heart ; the latter are the manufacture of 
tlie less trustworthy head. Every one knows that there is 
19 K 



218 UNIVERSALITY OF THE BELIEF IN GHOSTS. 

such a thing as feeling a proposition to be true, though the 
understanding may be unable to master it. The feelings, it 
has been well remarked, are famous for " hitting the nail on 
the head." Unlike the conclusions of the intellect, which 
are shaped more or less by education and country, their 
voice is no solitary sound, but the utterance of essential and 
universal human nature. It is to our feeling rather than to 
our thinking, that all the sublimest arguments in the universe 
are primarily addressed. Where logic works out one truth, 
the heart has already realized twenty ; because love, which 
is the heart's activity, is the profoundest and nimblest of 
philosophers. All things that live and are loveliest are 
born of the heart. This is why the ancients regarded the 
heart as the seat of wisdom — not of knowledge, but of that 
primary, intuitive wisdom to which knowledge is only an 
appendix. Hence then the value of the fact that in all 
ages and nations there has existed an intuitional conviction 
that the spirit of the dead immediately enters the eternal 
world, carrying with it an unmistakable corporeal personal- 
ity ; and that it can re-appear, under certain circumstances, 
to the survivors.* It is obvious that the reappearance of the 
dead requires, as a necessary condition, that there shall be 



* " ' That the dead are seen no more," said Imlac, " I ■will not un- 
dertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony 
of all ages, and of all nations. * * * This opinion, 
which prevails so far as human nature is diffused, could become 
universal only by its truth." — Rasselas. 

" From what remote source universal tradition may have derived 
this idea, would be a curious inquiry, and might be rendered im- 
portant. It is a pleasing subject, and imbued with that tender me- 
lancholy which peculiarly befits it for a mind of sensibility and fine 
taste. Its universality, independently of the testimony afforded it 
by revealed religion, is no small presumption of its being founded 
in fact." — Dr. Good, Book of Nature, Series iii., Lect. 1. 



ALL MEN AEE GHOSTS, 219 

a spiritual body, perfect in form and feature, as in the case 
of Moses and Elias. Unfortunately, the actual, solemn 
truth of the matter has had so much that is hlse and foolish 
heaped upon it, as to be in itself well-nigh smothered. 
Rightly understood, ghosts are no mere offspring of vulgar, 
ignorant superstition and credulity. Our prejudices and 
education may dispose us to think otherwise, but we should 
be slow in chiding opinions which have been embraced by 
any considerable portion of our fellow-men ; since the fact 
that a given doctrine has been widely accepted, and ear- 
nestly contended for, is a presumption that it contains a 
truth, or an aspect of a truth, essential to the complete ra- 
tional life of man. Most opinions are right up to a certain 
point, but with few men do they go far enough, or straight 
enough, to reflect the whole truth. All human beings are 
at this very moment ghosts ; but they do not so appear to 
you and me ; nor do you and I, who are also ghosts, so ap- 
pear to our neighbors and companions, because we are all 
similarly wrapped up in flesh and blood, and seen only 
as to our material coverings.* Literally and true, the 
ghost of a man is his soul or spiritual body ; and in or- 
der that this may be seen, it must be looked at with ade- 
quate organs of sight, namely, the eyes of a spiritual body 



* " Could anything be more miraculous than an actual, authentic 
ghost? The English Johnson longed all his life to see one, but 
could not, though he went to Cock-lane, and thence to the church- 
vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor ! Did he never, with 
the mind's eye, as well as the body's, look round him into that full 
tide of human life he so loved — did he never so much as look into 
himself? The good Doctor was a ghost, as actual and authentic as 
heart could wish ; well-nigh a million of ghosts were traveling the 
streets by his side. What else was he, what else are we ? * * 
It is no metaphor ; it is a simple scientific fact." — Carlyle, Sartor 
Mesartus, Book 3d, chap. 8th. 



220 SPIRITUAL SIGHT. 

like itself. We have such eyes, every one of us ; but during 
our time-life, they are buried deep in flesh and blood, and 
thus it is only when specially opened by the Almighty, for 
purposes of his providence, that it is possible for a ghost or 
spiritual body to be beheld. Much as our material eyes en- 
able us to see, they prevent our seeing inconceivably more. 
" The sight of man," says Lord Bacon, " carrieth a resem- 
blance with the sun, which openeth and revealeth the ter- 
restrial globe, but covereth and concealeth the stars and 
celestial globe. So doth the eye discover natural things, 
but darken and shut up divine." Such an opening of the 
spiritual sight took place at the Transfiguration, when the 
ghosts or spiritual bodies of Moses and Elias were seen. 
Such also takes place when the ghosts or spiritual bodies of 
the dead are now seen, and without it, it is impossible they 
can be viewed. Material eyes to material substances; spi- 
ritual eyes to spiritual ones. Hence it is that in accounts 
of spiritual appearances, both Scriptural and secular, how- 
'ever many persons may be present, it is rarely that more 
than one perceives the figure. The narrative in 2 Kings vi. 
14 — 17, is a remarkable instance: — "And Elisha prayed 
and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see. 
And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he 
saw" — what previously was visible only to the prophet. So 
in Daniel x. 7 : — "And I, Daniel, alone saw the vision, for 
the men that were with me saw not the vision." Tasso in- 
troduces the vision of Michael and his warrior angels to 
Godfrey only. Shakspere represents the spirit of Banquo 
as unseen by any one at the supper table except Macbeth. 
The popular or vulgar notion, that before a spirit can be 
seen it must assume our material nature, so far, at least, as 
to reflect the light of this world, is exactly the reverse of 
the truth ; which is that the change must be made in our- 
selves, i. e., by opening our spiritual sight. 



PHYSICAL THEOHY OF GHOSTS. 221 

136. Ghosts, therefore, so far from being mere phantoms 
or apparitions, the terrifying illusions of a heated imagina- 
tion, are far more real than our bodies of flesh and blood. 
They endure forever, whereas the latter are but temporary 
consolidations of a little atmosphere, with a few pounds of 
phosphate of lime. The invisible world is populated by them 
just as the visible one is occupied by material things; and 
as that world is all round about us, so are they too closely 
present. 

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth. 
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. 

They have their similitude in those glorified and imperish- 
able languages which we are accustomed to account and 
speak of as " dead." True, they have ceased to be alive in 
the vulgar sense, or as spoken languages ; yet are they living 
and immortal, to man's intelligence ; and one of our greatest 
privileges is to be sensible of their presence and their influ- 
ence on us. Would men but ascend to this high, and true, 
and most sacred understanding of the inhabitants of the 
unseen world, there would be no more fear of ghosts, nor 
would ghost-belief lay itself open to the ridicule which now 
it too often deserves. They would be relieved, too, of the 
embarrassment which, when scepticism stands mocking, often 
seduces to an insincere denial. Ghost-belief, in a word, not- 
withstanding its bad reputation, is coincident with belief in 
spirits and- angels, who are themselves the risen souls or 
spiritual bodies of mankind; and to know that there are 
angels, and to have so beautiful and salutary a subject of 
meditation, is one of the chief privileges and blessings of the 
Christian. Pity but it were dwelt upon more frequently. 
"There have been times, we know, when men thought too 
much of the dead. Such is not among the faults of the pre- 
sent age." It is quite likely that many supposed spiritual 

19* 



222 TESTIMONY OF POETRY. 

appearances may be explained on strictly physical principles, 
as shown by Drs. Ferriar and Hibbert ;* and especially in 
some kinds of disease it is likely that men fancy they see 
ghosts. But whoever is disposed to laugh at and repudiate 
the general proposition, should first read Mrs. Crow's 
" Night-side of Nature," applying to its narratives the prin- 
ciples we have laid down.f When spiritual bodies are really 
allowed to mortal view, it is probably not to the diseased, 
but to the healthy mind; and coming under the providence 
of God, as they always must, they may furthermore be con- 
sidered as vouchsafed, like the miracles of the New Testa- 
ment, and all the spiritual appearances therein recorded, 
not to the immoral or the unbeliever, "because of their un- 
belief," but only to those who are prepared to receive and 
appreciate intelligently. 

137. Poetry witnesses that "there is a spiritual body." 
Poetry is not, as some deem it, mere "privileged lying;" 
neither is it, in its essential nature, the simple embodiment 
of elegant but illogical fancies. The tales which the poet 
tells, as wilful and deliberate, may be, and doubtless are for 
the most part, fables. But the sayings and phraseology in 
which those tales are told, flowing half-unconsciously from 
the poet's heart, and altogether beside the mere Art of poetry, 
take place with the eternal verities of the universe. As 
regards scientific matters, and the minutiae of Natural His- 



* An Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions, by John Ferriar, 
M. D. London, 1813. 

Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions, or an Attempt to 
trace such ilhisions to their physical causes, by Samuel Hibbert, 
M. D. Edinburgh, 1824. 

f See also a Review of Mrs. Crowe's work in Ainsworth's Maga- 
zine for February, 1848, wherein- the claims of this department of 
knowledge are mildly and intelligently enforced. 



TESTIMONY OF POETRY. 223 

tory, doubtless there are errors in poetry as well as in prose. 
But the truth of poetry is independent of blunders in learn- 
ing; no less than of the imperfect science of its era. The 
supposition equally common, that poets must be dreamers, 
because there is often much dreaminess in poetry, is, again, 
purely gratuitous. "Vulgarly considered deficient in the 
reasoning faculty, the poets are remarkable rather for hav- 
ing it in excess. They jump the middle terms of their 
syllogisms, it is true: and assume premises to "which the 
world has not yet arrived ; but Time stamps their conclusions 
as invincible." Especially is the true and great poet a pro- 
found metaphysician ; a far profounder one, in general, than 
the metaphysicians by profession. "I have found more 
philosophic knowledge," says Dr. Millingen, "in the pro- 
ductions of our poets, than in all the metaphysical disquisi- 
tions of the learned." The only difference between the 
poet's reasoning and that of other men, is that it is a reason- 
ing more from feeling than from induction. Therefore is it 
that to those who approximate, and thus understand him, 
the true and great poet is not only a musical singer and a 
painter of beautiful pictures, but a speaker of Wisdom and 
Truth. To such, his utterances commend themselves as an ' 
apocalypse of human nature. Take, for instance, the lines 
in Twelfth Night, where Viola asks Sebastian if he is "a 
spirit:" — 

"A spirit I am indeed, 
But am in that dimension grossly clad, 
Which from the womb I did participate." 

Here, whatever may be attributed to the poet's imagination, 
we have at least the calm conclusion of the philosopher, for 
the character of Sebastian is one which fully justifies the 
•belief that of two possible answers Shakspere would assign 
to him the one which he himself considered the more sensi- 



224 TESTIMONY OF POETRY. 

ble.* Coleridge, Wordsworth, Bailey, (in "Festus,") all 
our best English poets, unite in tej^ching the same truth to 
the understanding that can rise to it. Shelley has an ex- 
quisite passage : — 

"Sudden arose 

lanthe's soul ! It stood 

All beautiful in naked purity, 
The perfect semblance of its bodily frame. 
Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace. 

Each stain of earthliness 
Had passed away ; it re-assumed 
Its native dignity, and stood 

Immortal amid ruin." 

How finely the self-disengagement of the soul at death, in 
the form of the body it leaves behind, is spoken of by the 
ancient poets, the scholar is well aware. When, for example, 
in the 11th ^Eneid, Camilla is described as extricating her- 
self from her corpse, after the spear of Aruns has brought 
her exploits to an end: — 

Turn frigida toto 
Paulatim exsolvit se corpore ; lentaque colla, 
Et captum letho posuit caput, &c. 

" Then of vital heat bereft, she disengages herself from the whole 
body by degrees, and reclines her drooping neck and head, capti- 
vated by death." 

It is not simply her life, or her "principle of volition," that 
goes, but se, herself. The souls of the dead, as ferried by 
Charon across the Styx, Virgil elsewhere designates corpora, 
"bodies." 



* See an "Essay on the Ghost-belief of Shakspere, by Alfred 
Eoffe," (Hope, London, 1851,) in which admirable performance, 
says one of his reviewers, " we have the first beginning of a study 
of Shakspere according to facts and nature." 



TESTIMONY OF LANGUAGE. 225 

138. The facts before us are borne out also by Language, 
which is a form of Poetry. "It is good," says an able 
writer, "to look to the ordinary language of mankind, not 
only for the attestation of natural truths, but for their sug- 
gestions; because common sense transfers itself naturally 
into language; and common sense, in every age, is the 
ground of the truths which can possibly be revealed. If we 
set our ideas before the glass of language, they receive, to 
say the least, a cordial welcome." By language we do not 
mean the mere art of speaking and writing according to 
some specific, arbitrary mode, which though intelligible in 
one country, is unintelligible in another. We mean that 
beautiful and inevitable flowering forth in speech of the 
inner living intellect of man, which, older and more excel- 
lent than all prosody and spelling, is an integral work of 
nature; and which, were it possible for the accidental forms 
which it may hold at any given epoch, as English and 
French, Latin and Greek, to be suddenly and totally 
abolished, would in itself be unaffected, and speedily incar- 
nate afresh, unchanged save in the extrinsic circumstances 
of costume. Looking into Language, we find accordingly, 
that whatever is vitally and essentially human, whatever 
distinguishes man from the brutes, it attributes, in all ages 
and countries, to "the soul" or "the spirit." It recognises 
the latter, not as a mere abstract principle, which is impotent, 
but as a living, active, substantial entity, such as alone can 
effect the deeds ascribed to it. It is "the spirit" that moves, 
prompts, withholds, and inclines us; that is grieved and 
troubled; that is elated and depressed. David exclaims, 
"Why art thou cast down, my soul, and why art thou 
disquieted within me?" We speak also of the rejoicing, 
triumphing, and despondency of the spirit; of having no 
spirit for a thing, and of being dispirited. Also of a poor 
spirit, a mean spirit, and a great spirit; a good soul, a kind 

K * 



226 FIGURES OF SPEECH. 

soul, and a willing soul. Every one of these affections or 
qualities, as they are ordinarily termed, is a disposition for 
the time being, of the true, immortal, spiritual man, who, 
underlying the material body, is the real thinker and the 
real emotionist. Call the expressions "figures of speech" 
if you will. But take care first to understand what are 
figures of speech, in their proper, essential nature; whence 
they arise; and why they are the same with all people, in 
all parts of the globe, independent of any instruction or 
compact. Men who seek to escape from a truth which 
presses inconveniently by beginning to talk about "figures 
of speech," only betray their ignorance of the first principles 
of language. Figures of speech, rightly so called, are the 
profoundest texts philosophy can start from. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

SOUZ—SriRlT—GBOST. 

139. Not a little of the confusion prevailing in the popu- 
lar mind with regard to the Soul, may unquestionably be 
referred to the fact of our having three distinct words for it, 
a proof at the same time of the inestimable value of an en- 
larged and accurate appreciation of the nature of Language 
in the determination and establishmeri.t of Truth, and of the 
evils that arise from inattention to it. Ordinarily, the 
"soul" of man, his "spirit," and his "ghost," are imagined 
to be three separate and distinct things. Directly we look 
to the inherent meaning of the several words, we find them, 
however, synonymous and convertible, and originally of a 
single signification and a single application. The soul of 
man is his spirit, and his spirit is his ghost; neither word 
meaning more or less than the Spiritual body. Undoubt- 
edly a conventional distinction has been made between the 
three terms, and a very proper and useful one it is, but un- 
fortunately it is not observed. "Soul" is well applied to the 
spiritual body during our residence in the flesh: "spirit," by 
metonymy, to that deep, interior, intellectual and emotional 
consciousness which is evidence to us of our spiritual life: 
"ghost" to the spiritual body when, casting off" its material 
vesture, it becomes an inhabitant exclusively of the spiritual 
world, and if pure, an angel. Were they always thus 
limited and applied, the words would carry meaning. As 
matters stand, they carry none, since no two writers use 

227 



228 NATURAL FOUNDATION OF LANGUAGE. 

them alike. That psychologists should have been content 
to go on discussing about the soul, year after year, and yet 
have allowed the sense of their text-word to go irreclaimably 
adrift, certainly is no credit to them; nor is it surprising 
that they have made so little way. Till a man is prepared 
to state the exact significance which he attaches to his 
terms, and till he has learned to be consistent in the use of 
them, it is better both for himself and for the world that he 
should fling away his pen. 

140. Together with the equivalent words in Hebrew, 
Greek, Latin, Sanscrit, and other languages, soul, spirit, and 
ghost literally denote Air or Breath. The metaphor is emi- 
nently just and beautiful, seeing that the air is the physical 
image and representative of Life ; and that it is in the invi- 
sible, spiritual part of man that Life is supremely throned. 
It is a truth alike of Scripture, philosophy, physiology, and 
poetry, that the Breath is the rejDresentative of Life. It 
stands in the first place as symbol of the organic life; 
secondly, and in superior degree, as symbol of the sj)iritual 
life. What language, by its intuitional usages, broadly 
asserts, the expositors of truth ratify and substantiate. 
Language indeed, or Philology, in its highest sense, is only 
another name for Philosophy. We have seen above how 
intimately the air is connected with organic life; that Respi- 
ration is the beginning, and ceasing to breathe, the end. 
Because of this connection, all the primitive names applied 
to organic life were simply transfers of the current appella- 
tions of the wind; subsequently, by virtue of the corres- 
pondence of the organic with the spiritual, the same names 
were extended upwards to the soul. Every one of these 
names denotes accordingly, in addition to air or wind, the 
life of the body, and is thus possessed not merely of a two- 
fold, but of a triple meaning. There is nothing singular in 
this. It exemplifies a general principle. No word either 



MEANING OF THE WORD SOUL. 229 

does or can denote a spiritual thing without at the same 
time denoting both a physiological or organic, and a phy- 
sical or inorganic thing. The reason is, that language rests 
universally upon objective Nature, and that objective Na- 
ture, in turn, is universally representative of spiritual things, 
proximately in its organic forms, remotely in its inorganic 
ones. The spiritual universally carries with it the physio- 
logical, and the physiological the physical, just as the 
capital of a column involves the shaft, and the shaft the 
pedestal. The physical and physiological meanings of words 
denoting spiritual things may be obsolete, but they are there, 
nevertheless, palpable and instructive to the philosophic eye, 
to which nothing that has ever had a meaning for mankind, 
ever absolutely dies. 

141. To place these great principles in the clear light sup- 
plied by facts, let us briefly examine the etymologies of the 
several words. If it serve only to give an agreeable variety 
to the general subject, the time will not be spent in vain. 
"Soul," as the most celebrated and familiar, naturally comes 
first. Soul, (Anglo-Saxon sawle, German seele,) is coinci- 
dent with the Latin halitws, breath, derived from halave, to 
breathe, a root familiar in the words ex.hale, inhale, and 
itself only an enlarged form, (like aaoc;, salus,) of the earlier 
word aid) or dw, a beautiful onomatopoeia, expressive in its 
long, open vowels, of the very act which it designates. Per- 
mutation of initial sounds, as in halitus and soul, a sibilant 
taking the place of an aspirate, a dental of a labial, &c., is 
one of the most common phenomena of spoken language. 
Colloquially, and in miscellaneous literature, soul is not 
now used in the sense of " breath ;" but in the authorized 
version of the Scriptures, or the English language of 1611, 
it often has this meaning. In 1 Kings xvii., for instance, 

"There was no breath left in him; and 

the Lord heard the voice of Elijah, and the soiil of the child 

20 



230 MEANING OF THE WORD SOUL. 

came into him again, and he revived." The second or phy- 
siological sense is also exhibited in the Bible, but more fre- 
quently in secular authors, as when they term the life of 
brutes the "animal soul." "There are," says Mr. Blakey, 
" in a certain sense, two souls in man. We give the name, 
first, to that physical life and organic power which we pos- 
sess in common vnih the animal and vegetable creation; 
secondly, to the principle of sensibility and thought, the soul 
which thinks, feels, reasons, and judges, and exists only in 
man." (Vol. 1, p. 61.) In the original, physical sense of 
the word soul, all creatures whatever have souls, inasmuch 
as they live by inhalation or breathing; so that to be "a 
living soul" is nothing peculiar to man, if we judge by the 
words alone, without exploring their philosophy. Many 
people, naturally ambitious, and unwilling to observe so 
many agreements as there are between themselves and the 
lower forms of creation, make it a matter of pride that our 
first parents were formed, as they suppose, in a manner dif- 
ferent from the parents of other animals. "God," they 
remind us, "breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, 
and he became a living soul," a circumstance not mentioned 
of the progenitors of any other species of creature. But 
neither is it mentioned of the first species of any other crea- 
ture that they were created "male and female." This, how- 
ever, can well afford to be let pass, when comjDared with the 
fact that the distinction apparently established by the words 
"living soul," presents itself only in the translation. There 
is no such distinction in the Hebrew, which in this instance 
applies identically the same terms to man and to brute. 
Each was made rrn Ci3J {nephesh chayali,) "a living soul;" 
only our translators have rendered the references to the 
brute creation (Gen. i. 21, 24,) "living creaiure." Either 
word might legitimately be substituted for the other. It is 
amusing that while many have entrenched themselves ia 



MEANIXa OF THE WORD GHOST. 231 

this phrase of " living soul," and found in it man's inalien- 
able characteristic, the exactly opposite conclusion has been 
arrived at by some of those whose curiosity had led them to 
the original. Both brutes and man being called "living 
creatures," or "living souls," some have inferred that brutes 
are as immortal as man; others that man is mortal as 
brutes. Man differs from the brutes not in respect of his 
being a "living soul," which is simply to be a "breather," 
such as they are; but in respect of his being so constituted 
as to be recipient of the knowledge of God, and of power to 
love him. Shakspere accredits the word soul with its full, 
final meaning, namely, the spiritual body when set free from 
flesh and blood : — 

Where souls do coucli on flowers, we'll hand in hand, 
And with our sprightly port make the ghost gaze. 

142. Ghost, (Anglo-Saxon gast, German geist,) shows its 
physical meaning in the cognate word " gust," as " a gust of 
wind ;" also in the term used to designate the aeriform sub- 
stance called " gas." In Old German, the grand-parent of 
English, geisten signified to blow. In a German Bible of 
the year 1483, " the breath of life" is translated " der geist 
des lebens." To " give up the ghost" is literally, to sur- 
render the breath ; the " Holy Ghost" is literally the breath 
of the Lord, as implied in his own words, when "He 
breathed on his disciples, and said, Receive ye the Holy 
Ghost." Where the English version of the Scriptures has 
"ghost" and "spirit," the Anglo-Saxon reads "gast." 
Wiclif, in his New Testament, spells " the holi goost." The 
" gist" of a subject, like the "spirit" of a book, or the animus 
of an action, signifies its soul or inmost principle. In Ger- 
man, geist continues to be used in many of the meanings 
which, with ourselves, are conveyed by " spii'it." Thus — 



232 SPIRIT. 

Was der Geist versprecht leistet die Natur. — Schiller. 
" What the Spirit promises, Nature performs/' 

143. Spirit, (Latin sjnritus,) takes us to the very origin 
of words, resting on tlie beautiful lisp or whisper with which 
the breezes quiver the leaves. All words, we may observe, 
are expansions of a few hundred primitive onomatopoeias, 
more or less obviously preserved in them, and which, like 
the sp in spirit, constitute their ultimate " roots." 

Fresh gales and gentle airs 
Whisper'd it to the woods. — Paradise Lost. 

And there is heard the ever-moving air 
Whisp'ring from tree to tree. — Shelley. 

In solitudes 
Her voice came to me through the whisp'ring woods. — lb. 

Virgil shows the etymology at a glance, for who that knows 
aught of the sweet music of nature does not perceive that 
the bare idea of blowing is the least part of his auras spi- 
rantes f The Greek form of the word, (pcdupcafjia., is one of 
the most beautiful onomatopoeias extant in any language. 
"■Ado, sings Theocritus — 

"A(5i) Ti rd ipi9vpia-na Kal a Trlrvg." 

" Sweet is the whisper of the wind among the fir-trees !" 

Whoever wrote that little gem of the Orphica, the hymn to 
the Zephyrs, 

avpat TTOi'ToycveT; Zc(l>vpiTiSss, iqcpofoiroif 
flSvvvooi, ipidupai, K.r.X., 

the, introduction of this one word is enough to announce 
him Poet. ISTow-a-days a man can adopt epithets from a 
thousand predecessors ; the Greek had only nature, and his 
own apt, living, luxuriant heart. Virgil not only illustrates 
the origin of the word spirit, but its several applications. 



SPIRIT AND ITS COaNATE TERM. 233 

Thus, as given to the breath, in that charming description 
were Iris, mingling with the exiled Trojan ladies as they 
walk mourning by the sea, though she has laid aside her 
goddess' vestments, and personates a decrepid old woman, is 
still unable to conceal herself: 

Non Beroe vobis, non hsec Ehoeteia, matres 
Est Dorycli conjux : divini signa decoris, 
Ardentesque notate oculos : qui spiritus illi. 
Qui vultus, vocisve sonus, vel gressus eunti. 

" Matrons, this is not Beroe who stands before you, not the wife 
of Doryclus. Mark here the characters of divine beauty ! See how 
bright her eyes ! What fragrance in her breath ! What majesty in 
her looks ! Or mark the music of her voice, and the graceful mien 
with which she moves !" 

It denotes Life where JEneas is heard protesting fidelity 
to the too-confiding, ill-requited Dido : 

Nee me meminisse pigebit Elisse 
Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos reget artus ! 
"Never shall I be slow to think of Dido, while I retain any 
recollection of myself, or life to actuate these limbs !" 

144. In connection with the word spirit, it is interesting 
to note the cognate term " spiral," seeing that it involves 
the same idea. Similarly derived from spiro to blow, its 
fundamental allusion is to the well-known phenomenon of 
the spiral movement of the wind. Now this peculiar move- 
ment, the spiral, delineates a Form, which form thus be- 
comes an emblem or pictorial representative of the wind, 
and thence of what the wind itself represents, namely. Life. 
All forms are representative, and their significance is the 
science of sciences. There are lower, higher, and highest 
forms. Forms made up of straight lines, and thus angular, 
with flat surfaces, as crystals, are of the lowest degree, and 
accord with what is inorganic, inanimate, and basal gene- 

20 » 



234 THE SPIRAL FORM, 

rally. Next comes the form of which the sphere and the 
circle are the type — a form derived from the extension of 
the primitive point in all directions, and which is essentially 
connected with the organic and animate. Whatever in the 
universe exhibits a totality, is always a solid circle or sphere. 
Portions of circles, or curves, conjoined with the straight 
line and angle, give that innumerable variety of profiles 
and configurations which we see among animals and plants. 
Rarely is the curve found in the inorganic department of 
creation. Only perhaps in the spherules of quicksilver, on 
the convex side of drops of water and other liquids, in bub- 
bles, and in some few minerals. In the degree that crystals 
multiply their surfaces, and thus lose their great angles and 
facets, they approach the spherical or organic form. The 
dodecahedron, for example, approaches the sphere more 
nearly than the octohedron ; the octohedron more nearly 
than the cube. Highest of all is the Spiral form, which in 
its own highest kind, or as produced by winding a thread 
round a cylinder, is the circle infinitely continued. The 
circle returns into itself, ending where it began ; but the 
possible beginning and ending of a spiral the imagination 
cannot conceive. The spiral, therefore, rather than the 
circle, is the true symbol of eternity. The spiral form is 
identified with no department of creation in particular, 
because an emblem of the omnipresent principle which 
equally sustains all. It shows itself most remarkably in 
the Vegetable kingdom, where it is the law of the arrange- 
ment of the leaves, and thus of the buds and flowers. 
Almost all the wonderful diversities in the contour of plants 
come of their spirals of development being more or less 
stretched or contracted. Thus, alternate leaves become 
opposite by a slight contraction ; opposite ones become ver- 
ticillate by a greater. Flowers universally are produced by 
the contraction of the spiral into a series of concentric 



ANIMA AND ANIMUS. 235 

rings, the highest part of the spiral becoming the centre, 
and. its lowest part the cii'cumference. Certain fruits, as fir- 
cones, show the spiral in the most beautiful manner. In- 
ternally, plants abound with a delicate kind of veins known 
as " spiral vessels." Stems, again, which are too slender to 
stand upright, lift themselves into the air by twining spirally 
round a stronger neighbor. As respects the animal king- 
dom, the spiral is a frequent and beautiful feature in uni- 
valve shells ; where also, as in plants, much of the wonderful 
variety comes of the spiral being more or less contracted. 
In the lovely genera Cerithium, Pleurostoma, Fusus, Tur- 
ritella, &c., one extreme is shown ; in Cyprsea, Conus, 
Strombus, &c., the other. The beautiful spiral by which 
the Vorticellse extend and retract themselves gives to the 
movements of these little creatures an elegance and spright- 
liness unsurpassed. In human organization the spiral is 
less observable, except that it adorns the head with curls 
and ringlets. Human life, on the other ^hand, is one un- 
broken, endless spiral, and here we realize the greatness and. 
amplitude of the significance of the spiral Form. Life 
winds its little circles, hour by hour, day by day, year by 
year, faithfully concluding each before another is begun, but 
never failing to commence afresh where it left off*, and so 
goes on everlastingly, riug rising upon ring, every circle 
covering and reiterating its predecessors, on a higher level, 
nearer and nearer to the heavens. The material body drops 
away, like dead leaves, but Life goes on, in beautiftil and 
ceaseless aspiration. Nowhere in nature is there a more 
charming emblem of Life than the common scarlet or 
twining bean of our gardens, while rising to its maturity. 

145. Animus, the usual Latin word for the soul, short- 
ened in French into dme, is the same word as anima, the 
wind, in Greek dwsfxo^, whence the pretty name anemone, 
or wuld-flo^Yer. The subordinate senses are preserved, like 



236 PSYCHE. 

those of spiritus, in the Latin authors. Thus, " aurarumque 
leves aninue," " the light breezes of the winds ;" (Lucretius 
V. 237.) "Ah miseram Eurydicen, animd fugiente, vocabat," 
"Ah, unfortunate Eurydice, he cries with his fast-fleeting 
breath." (Georgic iv. 526.) The earlier etymological his- 
tory is found in the Sanscrit language, in which breath is 
called anas and cinilas, the root being an. Though essen- 
tially the same word, a useful practical distinction is made 
in Latin between the two forms anima and animws; the forr 
mer being restricted, in its figurative ascent, to the organic 
life, whence it is usually translated " life," " vital principle," 
or " animal soul ;" while to the latter is allowed the higher 
meaning of spiritual life, whence it is generally translated 
" rational soul :" — 

Mundi 
Principio indulsit communis conditor illis 
Tantum animas, nobis animum quoque, &c. 

Juvenal, Sat. xv. 147. 
" In the beginning of the world, the Creator vouchsafed to brutes 
only the principle of vitality ; to us he gave souls also, that an in- 
stinct of affection, reciprocally felt, might urge us to seek, and to 
give, assistance." 

146. Woyjrj.) the Greek word generally understood to 
mean " soul," comes from (puy^co to blow, and would seem 
to be of kindred onomatopcstic origin with spirikis. Kacpoi 
dvaipo^ecoQ, " the times of refreshing," (Acts iii. 19) is lite- 
rally " the times of the blowing of the cool wind." There 
is a good deal of misconception as to this famous word." 
What it ordinarily intends in Greek literature, both sacred 
and secular, is not the spiritual, immortal part of man, but 
his animal or time-life. " Take no thought for your life" — 
Hrj iieptytvaze Trj<: (p'j')^cou 5pta)V, with the context, well illus- 
trates its ordinary New Testament significance. In Rev. 
xvi. 3, fishes are called (po^ai;. Conformably with these 



PNEUMA. 237 

usages, " the natural body," ^. e., the material body, endowed 
with organic, animal life only, and belonging exclusively to 
the temporal world, is termed by St. Paul, aoiha (pw^ixbv, 
while the spiritual, immortal body he calls acofxa TTusofiazi- 
■/.bv. Undoubtedly, "soul" in its high, metaphysical and 
theological senses, is occasionally intended by (poyy]; but its 
most useful signification is simply the life which animates 
the temporary, material body. Many of the ancients attri- 
buted to the latter all that is psychological as well as physi- 
ological in our nature. With these, accordingly, (pWj^vj in- 
cludes both "life" and "mind," or anima and animus, and 
is their collective appellation.* 

147. What is generally intended in to-day's English by 
" soul," i. e., the immortal, thinking part of man, is in Greek 
mostly called TTi^eu/ia. Translators render it " spirit." The 
primary or physical sense is illustrated by St. John — " the 
ivind bloweth where it listeth ;" and the secondary or physi- 
ological one by St. Matthew — " Jesus yielded up the ghost" 
(xxvii. 50,) Tcveofxa being the Greek word in both cases. 
When in the New Testament (poyr/j and Tiveuiio. occur in 
juxtaposition, the sense is tantamount to the colloquial 
phrase " life and soul." But they are translated soul and 
spirit," as in Heb. iv. 12, fostering the popular mistake that 
the soul (theologically so called) and the spirit are distinct 
things. Nothing can exceed the confusion into which even 
intelligent people are often unconsciously drawn, through 
the want of a clear understanding of the great truth, so sub- 
lime in its simplicity, " that there is a natural body, and 
there is a spiritual body," — not there will be, but there is, 
and that this spiritual body is the ever-living soul or spirit. 
If any doubt the existence of such confusion, let them read 



* On Homer's use of the word, see a learned paper from the Ger- 
man of Voelcker, in the Classical Museum for 1845. 



238 SPIRIT, SOUL, AND BODY. 

Wesley's 41st hymn — "And am I born to die ?" and see if 
they can shut the book with the least glimmering of com- 
prehension of what it means. " Spirit, soul, and body," as 
in 1 Thess. v. 23, is a Scriptural periphrase for the whole 
man, as he exists during his time-life; "spirit" denoting the 
life of the intellect and affections, or of the internal man ; 
" soul" the life of the body, as exercised in the appetites and 
animal instincts ; " body" the sacred instrument with which 
those lives are enabled to be played forth into the world. 
Soul and body, or (puyji and acopia, have reference to this 
world only ; spirit, or Ttveufia, belongs also to the world to 
come. Consentaneously with this, man is Scripturally 
called " flesh" when his mortality is the subject of discourse ; 
" soul" when his animal propensities are chiefly alluded to ; 
"spirit" when his intellectual or emotional nature or the in- 
ternal man, is the theme. The ghosts, or disengaged spirit- 
ual bodies of the dead, are called Ttveufioxa, or " sj)irits," by 
the inspired writers, on a principle already set forth. 

148. The Hebrew words corresponding with soul, &c., of- 
fer precisely similar histories, nil (rtiahJi) denotes the wind 
in Gen. viii. 1 ; breath, frequently; temporal life, in the his- 
tory of Samson — "when he had drank, his spirit came 
again ;" spiritual life, and life in the general sense, or the 
all-sustaining energy of the Creator, also very often. ty3J 
(nephesJi) and rraa'J (oieshamaJi) are equivalents in every 
way. A minute exposition of the application of these 
words, constitutes, along with relevant matter, an invalu- 
able little book by the Rev. George Bush, Professor of He- 
brew at New York — " Soul, or an Inquiry into Scriptural 
Psychology." New York, 1845. 

149. Comparing these various facts, the conclusion we 
come to is, that while on the one hand, the soul is no mere 
appendage to human nature, shapeless and incomprehensi- 
ble, or at best, " life ;" on the other hand, that wondrous 



THE BOBY THE APPENDAGE TO THE SOUL. 239 

spiritual body in which we find it, is the veritable, essential 
Man — ipse — " the man in the man." Rightly regarded, it is 
not the soul that is the appendage, but the body. As a mate- 
rial body, it is admirable and incomparable ; but placed be- 
side that which alone gives dignity and glory to the idea of 
man, it confesses itself no more than a piece of mechanism, 
spread over him for awhile, in order that during his reten- 
tion of it, it may act on the material world and its inhabit- 
ants, and fashion his intellect and moral character. It is 
the strong right arm with which he is impowered to enforce 
his arbitrations. Man is created for heaven, not for earth ; 
therefore he is fundamentally a spiritual, and only provi- 
sionally a material being. The sc'do(; of his nature is the 
spiritual body; the material is only its el'dcoXov.^' The 
ecd(oXov is first to mortal eyes and understanding ; but the 
spiritual £cdo(; is the first to fact and truth ; just as the ut- 
tered word is the first to the listener, but the invisible, 
underlying thought the first to the speaker. Truly and 
beautifully has man been called a "word" of the Creator. 
The spiritual body is the seat of all thought, all emotion, 
all volition ; excepting, of course, such purely animal voli- 
tion as belongs to the organic life, and is participated in by 
the brutes. The material body does no more than fulfill the 
instincts of its own proper organic or brute life, save when 
the spiritual body gives forth a mandate. Intimately com- 
bined with its envelope till the latter wears out, or falls 
sick, and dies, the spiritual body then renounces all connec- 
tion with it ; throws it back into its native dust, as 



* The difference between eMo; and eWcoXov is not generally discri- 
minated by tlie lexicons as it deserves ; — dhos denotes the true, es- 
sential form of a thing; eUiSXov, on the contrary, the apparent, 
painted, or external : eHwXov is the diminutive of dios not in reference 
to extent or bulk, but in respect of perfection and essence. 



240 SLEEP OF THE SOUL. 

the snake casts his enamell'd skin : 

or as 
The grasshoppers of the summer lay down their worn-out dresses,* 

and becomes conscious of the Better Land. Its own life 
goes on as before. At least there is not the slightest reason 
to suppose, either on Scriptural or philosophical grounds, 
that its vital activity is for one instant suspended. The 
notion that the soul falls into a kind of sleep or lethargy, on 
the death of the body, though a very common one, is indeed 
utterly at variance both with the deductions of philosophy 
and the intimations of Holy Writ, which plainly informs us 
that the spirit rises immediately after death, as in the para- 
ble of Lazarus and the rich man, and in the address of our 
Saviour to the crucified thief, " This day shalt thou be with 
me in Paradise;" a prophecy, moreover, impossible on any 
other understanding than that of a spiritual body. Just 
what the soul is, when it shakes off the material envelope, it 
continues to he, retaining all its loves, desires, and inclina- 
tions, be they good or evil, pure or impure ; and upon these 
it goes on expending its life, the only difference being in the 
immediate results to the individual, seeing that the sphere 
wherein those loves, &e. are now played forth, is absolutely 
spiritual, and governed by laws and conditions of its own. 
Of the origin of the notion of the soul's sinking into a state 
of torpor after death, there can be no doubt. Like most 
other falsities in psychology, and like many in theology, it 
comes of false physiology, and is directly traceable to the 
materialist's figment that life is a function of oi'ganization, 
the corollary of which is, that as there is no visible organi- 



* ut olim 
Cum veteres ponunt tunicas sestate cicadse. 

Lucretius, Lib. iv. 55-56. 



MAN A DENIZEN OF TWO WORLDS. 241 

zation but that of matter, therefore matter is essential to 
man's existence ; and thus, that when denuded of it at death, 
his soul collapses into an insensate, motionless, incompetent 
nothing, so to remaia till reclothed with flesh and blood. 
But this, as we have seen, is altogether fallacious. Man is 
a thinking, feeling, immortal creature, not by virtue of his 
material body, but by virtue of his spiritual body. From 
the first moment of his existence, he is an inhabitant both 
of the material and of the spiritual world. He dwells con- 
sciously in the one, unconsciously in the other; and the 
change induced on him by "death" is simply that this state 
of matters is reversed. That is, he then dwells conscioiisly 
in the spiritual world, but is no longer a percijDient of the 
material one. Why, during his first state, he sees and 
knows nothing, consciously, of the spiritual world, is that he 
is blindfolded by the "muddy vesture of decay." "Why he 
is afterwards unconscious of the material world, is that in 
order to realize it, he must possess an appropriate material 
organism. We live in the spiritual world, all of us, as per- 
sons blind from birth live in the present material one, i. e., 
in it, but not seeing it; and the death of the material body 
(which involves the permanent opening of the spiritual 
sight) is like the couching of the eyes of such persons by an 
oculist, and enabling them to see what surrounds them. In 
our chapter on the Future State, this will receive its due 
meed of illustration. 

150. That there are many and great difiiculties in con- 
ceiving of the mystery of the spiritual body, that is, of the 
Soul, has already been amply conceded. He who would 
afiect to deny them would only betray his ignorance both 
of himself and his subject. Embedded as we are in the 
material, the mind needs first to assume the doctrine, and 
then gradually ascend to the verification. Following a clue, 
and knowing what we are looking for, the evidence is found. 
21 L 



242 DIFFICULTIES IN REGARD TO THE SOUL. 

We act no differently, day by day, when we enter on the 
study of any new and comprehensive subject in physical or 
physiological science. Not that this is a new doctrine, but 
only an unfamiliar one. "It is a venerable creed, like a 
dawn on the peaks of thought, reddening their snows from 
the light of another sun, the substance of immemorial reli- 
gions, the comfort of brave simplicity, though the doubt of 
to-day, and the abyss of terrified science." It is hard, for 
instance, to think at first of spiritual form, because all our 
ordinary experience of form presses upon us the idea of ma- 
terial solidity. It is hard, likewise, to think how the spiritual 
body is circumstanced with regard to what in the material 
world are called Time and Space. Accustomed as we are 
to regard space and the spiritual as antithetical, we are at 
first quite indisposed to admit that a spiritual being can be 
bounded by space. It is true, nevertheless. Nothing but 
Deity can be everywhere at once. There must be portions 
even of the sj)iritual world where a given spirit is not. 
Therefore the spiritual body is subject to a condition at all 
events answering to space. Again, it is hard, nay, it is im- 
possible, to conceive of what may be called the procreation 
and birth of the spiritual body, and in what mode and 
respect these are concurrent with the procreation and birth 
of the material body. We can satisfy ourselves of nothing 
more than that God creates the soul when needed, and not 
before.* The organization of the spiritual body is equally 



* For opinions on the subject, see Dickinson's JPhysica Vetus et 
Vera, cap. 11 ; Blakey's History of the Philosophy of the Mind, vol. 
1, p. 197; and Clowes' Fourth Letter on the Human Soul. The 
famous doctrine of the "pre-existence" of the soul, it is beside our 
present purpose to discuss. See, for an enthusiastic defence of it, 
"Xwx Orientalis, or an Enquiry into the opinions of the Eastern 
Sages, concerning the pre-existence of the Soul." 12mo., 1662. 



DIFFICULTIES ARE NO OBJECTION. 243 

beyond the range of man's present powers. There can be 
little doubt, however, that mstead of a simple homogeneity, 
as commonly supposed, the soul is eminently composite, 
" There are some things in Paul's description of the spiritual 
body," says Dr. Hitchcock, "which make it quite probable 
that its organization will be" (or rather is) "much more 
exquisite than anything in existence on earth. He repre- 
sents the spiritual body as far transcending the material 
body both ia glory and power ; and since the latter is ' fear- 
fully and wonderfolly made,' nothing but the most exquisite 
organization can give the spiritual body such a superiority 
over the natural." (Religion of Geology, Lect. xiv.) Then 
there is the nature of the sex of the spiritual body, which is 
as immortal as itself, albeit that in heaven "there is neither 
marrying nor giving in marriage." Sex, in its true idea, 
belongs to the soul, not to the body, in which it is only 
representatively and temporally present. This fine subject 
the reader may see treated with admirable delicacy and 
philosophy in Haughton's "Sex in the Future State." 

151. Because of such difficulties, and because too intensely 
accustomed to the material to welcome such propositions as 
have been set forth, some will not improbably receive them 
with a laugh, and tax us at least with superstition.* Good. 
If superstition it be to hold such views, it is a superstition 
far more valuable and fertilizing to the mind than all that 
some men esteem the truth. Putting faith before charity in 
all they do, and deceiving themselves by substituting nar- 



* It is scarcely necessary to repeat that the vulgar notion respect- 
ing ghosts, including "haunted houses," "spirit-rapping," white 
sheets, &c., &c., is altogether apart from the doctrine of the spiritual 
body. The latter is Scriptural and philosophical, whereas the for- 
mer is neither, but utterly contemptible, and does not even call for 
the disclaimer which would asknowledge it to deserve one. 



244 FACTS AND HYPOTHESES. 

row and exclusive notions for a comprehensive and benign 
belief, many men's "truth" is nothing but traditional, barren 
error. We ask no one to accept uninquiringly, and should 
be sorry for any one who did. " What a man takes upon 
trust," remarks Locke, " is but shreds, which however well 
they may look in the whole piece, make no considerable ad- 
dition to his stock who gathers them. So much only as we 
ourselves consider and comprehend of truth and reason, so 
much only do we possess of real and true knowledge. The 
floating of other men's opinions in our brains, makes us not 
one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true. 
Like fairy money, they turn to dust when they come to be 
used." On the other hand, let no one too hastily reject. 
Disbelieve after inquiry, if you see cause to ; but never begin 
with disbelief Premature condemnation is the fool's func- 
tion. It goes for nothing to say that the evidence of the 
truth of a proposition does not appear. Do you see the 
evidence of its falsity F Before you reject a proposition or 
series of propositions, for what you suppose to be their error, 
take care that you apprehend all their truth; or as Carlyle 
shrewdly advises, " Be sure that you see, before you assume 
to oversee." Indeed, till the truth of a theme be appre- 
ciated, its error, if any, cannot be detected. Such doctrines 
as this of the spiritual body it is impossible to grasp on the 
instant. They must be thought out, from the data which 
Scripture supplies, and philosophy illustrates. Hypothetical 
though they may be, in certain points, this again is no valid 
objection, since without hypothesis it is impossible to advance 
a single step. " Philosophy proceeds upon a system of credit ; 
and if she never advanced beyond her tangible capital, her 
wealth would not be so enormous as it is."* Difficulty in 
finding interpretation of anomalies and perplexities "is no 



* Eev. W. Thomson, "Outlines of the Laws of Thought." 



OPINIONS OF THE FATHERS, &C. 245 

argument," as Baden Powell truly observes, "against the 
general truth of a proposition ; nor need it lead us into ex- 
travagant and gratuitous speculations to bring about a pre- 
cise explanation where the circumstances do not furnish 
sufficient data. Having once grasped firmly a great priaci- 
ple, we should be satisfied to leave minor difficulties to wait 
their solution, assured that time will clear them up, as it 
has done before with others." The fact is, all great and 
sacred truths, and there are none grander and more sacred 
than this of the spiritual body, come to us at first, "like the 
gods in Homer, enveloped in blinding mist." But to him 
whom their descent to earth concerns, — ^to him who stands 
most in need of their help, and who can most gratefully ap- 
preciate, and best apply the privilege, "the cloud becomes 
luminous and fragrant, and discloses the divinity within." 
The eye that in the beginning was so dim, presently feels 
itself sparkle and dilate, and what the intellect fails to read, 
the quick heart interprets. 

As when the moon hath comforted the night. 
And set the world in silver of her light. 

152. It may be interesting to conclude the^Srgument that 
the soul is a spiritual body with a few citations of authors 
by whom the doctrine has been treated or approved. Among 
the Fathers there does not appear to have been one who re- 
garded the soul as most modern authors do. They seem 
rather to have been unanimous as to its corporeity, though 
on the nature of this corporeity they widely differed. Ter- 
tullian argues not only that the soul is a body, and that it 
holds the human form, but that God himself is a body, for 
that what is bodiless is nothing.* Augustia, though he finds 



* De Anima, near the beginning, Opera, p. 307; and Adversus 
Praxeam, ib. p. 637. (Ed. Paris, 1641.) 
21* 



246 OPINIONS OF THE FATHERS, &C. 

fault with Tertullian, from the mistaken notion that his 
views involve materialism, by no means rejects them.* 
Theodotus is very explicit; d)jM xac rj (poyyi autiw. x. r. X., 
"the soul also is a body, for the apostle says, It is sown;" 
&c.t Methodius, also, in his treatise on the resurrection ; 
" The souls," says he, " created by the Creator and Father of 
all, are acofxara voepa.^ intellectual bodies, and adorned as 
they are, with members which are perceived by reason, 
. . . . are said to have a tongue, finger, and other 
parts, as in the case of Lazarus and the rich man.J Maca- 
rius, the celebrated homilist, observes — " Each one, according 
to his nature, is a body, whether angel or soul. For al- 
though these bodies are attenuate, nevertheless they are in 
substance, character, and figure, according to the respective 
subtleties of their nature, subtle bodies; in like manner as 
the body we now possess in one that is nayuz^ dense."§ 
Suicer, in his great theological cyclopaedia, the Thesaurus 
Ecclesiasticus, article (po'^q^ may be consulted for more of 
the same kind. * Passing on to later times, we find the doc- 
trine upheld by Lord Bacon: — "And this spirit whereof we 
speak," says he, "is not from virtue, or energy, or act, or a 
trifle, but plainly a body, rare and invisible, notwithstanding 
circumscribed by place, quantitative, real."|| Andrew Bax- 



"^ See the vindication of Tertullian in Dr. Edward Burton's 

"Bampton Lectures," Appendix, note 59, 1829. 

f Clemens Alex. O-pera., p. 791. (Ed. Paris, 1629.) 

X The curious student will find this treatise well worth attention, 

or at least the excerpta given in that inestimable treasure-house of 

Elegant Extracts, the Myriobiblion of Photious, pp. 907-932. (Ed. 

Eouen, 1653.) 

Pi Homily iv. Works, p. 21. (Ed. Paris, 1722.) 

II History of Life and Death. Works. Vol. xiv., p. 410. 



MODERN AUTHORS AND THE SPIRITUAL BODY. 247 . 

ter, in his Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, 
confesses that a difference between the soul after the death 
of the material body, and a spiritual body, is a difference he 
cannot comprehend. Sennertus adopts the doctrine in his 
Epitomes Physicce.^ Cudworth, likewise, though with some 
diffident reservations, in the True Intellectual System: — 
"Even here, in this life, our body is, as it were, twofold, in- 
terior and exterior; we having, besides the grossly tangible 
bulk of our outward body, another interior, spiritual body, 
. . . . which latter is not put into the grave with the 
other." (Page 806.) The introductory chapter of one of 
the first metaphysical works in the English language, But- 
ler's Analogy of Religion, though it does not speak of the 
doctrine by name, in argument fully acknowledges it. 
From recent writers may be selected as follows: — Monck 
Mason, in his Creation by the Immediate Agency of God, 
written in reply to the Vestiges, after describing the inces- 
sant atomic change of the material body, observes in 
reference to the preservation of its identity. — " There 7nust 
be a permanent representative within, which is not material, 
— which is the Soul." Dr. Moore, in the Preface to his 
work on the Power of the Soul over the Body, defines the 
former as " a spiritual being, resident in the body." " The 
being," he continues, "that now feels, thinks, acts, and agi- 
tates the vital frame-work, will forever be subjected to affec- 
tions and emotions, wherever it may dwell." Geofiroy de 
St. Hilaire expresses similar opinions in a communication to 
the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, published in their 
Reports for 1837. Morell, in his Elements of Psychology, 
is disposed to call the mind "a spiritual organism." "The 
real man consists in the abiding power which the body con- 
tains to assimilate everything to a given form and idea." 



Lib. viii., cap. 1. Opera, vol. ii., p. 81. 



248 MODERN AUTHORS ON THE REAL MAN. 

The doctrine is set forth in all its excellence and plenitude 
in J. J. Garth Wilkinson's masterly work, "The Human 
Body, and its connection with Man;" also in the "Anastasis" 
of Professor Bush, and in the Rev. E. D. Rendell's truly 
excellent "Treatise on the Peculiarities of the Bible." 



CHAPTER XIV. 

TRVE IDEA. OF YOUTH AND AGE. 

153. The phenomena of the spiritual expression of life 
are the operations of the Intellect and Affections, or what 
phrenologists term the Intellectual and the Affective facul- 
ties. Everything which belongs to man as a reasoning and 
emotional being, is included in these two great divisions, and 
the language of nature calls them, in its most ancient as 
well as in its most modern tongues, the Head and the Heart. 
The distinction is the Scriptural one, though philosophy is 
only beginning to recognize it.* It is the Intellect and 
Affections, accordingly, which essentially express human 
life ; for the life of the body is but the life of an animal, 
and little more than that of a tree. 'All things eat, and 
drink, and sleep, and propagate, but only man can think 



* " Metaphysicians," says Cory, " have at length approximated to 
a truth which in the metaphysics of Christianity, is laid down with 
as much perspicuity and decision as the immortality of the soul, or 
any other of those points which have been so continually agitated 
among philosophers, modern as well as ancient. The distinction 
between the Intellect and the Emotions or Affections, to which, 
simple as it may appear, such laborious approaches have been made, 
through the thorny paths of metaphysics, is clearly drawn in the 
Scriptures, and the respective seats of them assigned, figuratively, 
but most naturally, to the Head and Heart, and to the heart the 
Scriptures most constantly appeal." — Metaphysical Inquiries, p. 200. 
(1833.) 

L » 249 



250 WORK A LIVING HYMN OF PRAISE. 

and love. Everything which brings genuine delight and 
dignity to human existence — everything implied in hope and 
faith, in wisdom and affection, comes of this heavenly boon. 
Introducing man firstly to the loveliuess of the. material 
creation, which to the brute is invisible ; afterwards it intro- 
duces him to the immortal splendors of the spiritual crea- 
tion, and to the company of the angels. The veritable 
golden chain let down from heaven, which old Homer saw 
dimly, the life of the Intellect and Affections is that by 
which man is allowed to become sensible how near and 
enduring is his relation to his Creator, for it is by these 
alone he is approachable. Essentially expressing human 
life, the acquirements of these two great spiritual faculties, 
or Ideas and Emotions, are man's only genuine Property. 
We have nothing else that we can either call or make abso- 
lutely our own ; we need nothing besides, for these comprise 
all things worth possession. They are the cup of ambrosia 
presented to immortalized Psyche. 

154. With such a destiny attached to it, how inestimable 
a prerogative is human life ! And what ingratitude to mis- 
use it. Life may be misused without being aftused. It is 
misused if it be not so employed as to be enjoyed, i. e., by 
makiug the most of its opportunities; in other words, 
devoting it to honorable deeds, affectional as well as intel- 
lectual. The more strenuously we enact such deeds, the 
more genuine, because practical, is our acknowledgment of 
the Divine goodness in bestowing life, and the keener be- 
comes our aptitude for sucking the honey of existence. 
Work or activity, of whatever kind it be, uprightly and 
earnestly pursued, is a living hymn of praise. It is truest 
obedience also, for it is God's great law that" whatever 
powers and aptitudes he has given us, shall be honorably 
and zealously employed. The energy of life, when fairly 
brought out, is immense; immense beyond what any one 



LIFE INTENDED TO BE HAPPY. 251 

who has not tried it can imagine. Too often neglected, and 
allowed to lapse into weakness ; trained and exercised, it 
will quicken into grandeur. It is better to wear out than to 
rust out, says a homely proverb, with more meaning than 
people commonly suppose. Rust consumes faster than use. 
To " wear out" implies life and its pleasures ; to " rust," the 
stagnation of death. Life, rightly realized, is embosomed 
in light and beauty. The world is not necessarily a " vale 
of tears." God never intended it to be so to any one. All 
his arrangements are with an opposite design, and to be ful- 
filled, only need man's response and cooperation. True, in 
his all-wise providence, he sends troubles upon men, and 
grievous ones ; but they are never so great as those they 
bring upon themselves, and willingly suffer. What shall be 
our experience of life rests mainly with ourselves. The 
world may render us unfortunate, but it cannot make us 
miserable ; if we are so, the fault lies in our own bosoms. 
It is not only the great who order their own circumstances. 
On the wide, wild sea of human life, as on that where go 
the ships, the winds and the waves are always on the side 
of the clever sailor. Though one breast prove unfaithful, 
there are plenty of others that do not. It is still our own 
to rejoice in the belief of the good and beautiful, and to 
weave out of this belief a perennial happiness. If we take 
precautions to form and preserve a sound estimate of what 
is past, the joyful experience and the sorrowful alike, we 
rarely have cause for regret, and always abundance for hope 
and thankfulness ; for that which spoils life is seldom so 
much the occurrence of certain events, as the perverted recol- 
lection of them, and of this, happy events no less than un- 
happy ones may be the subject. Even if a man make no 
effort of himself — if he be so neglectful as not to realize the 
brilliant opportunities permitted to him, so fully as he may, 
still is life crowded with pleasures. When there is shadow, 



252 TRUE IDEA OF LONGEVITY. 

it is because there is sunshine not far off. Its weeds and 
thorns are known by contrast with surrounding flowers, and 
though upon many even of the latter there may be rain- 
drops, those that are without are yet more abounding. 
There are more smiles in the world than there are tears ; 
there is more love than hate, more constancy than forsaking : 
those that murmur the contrary, choose not for thy com- 
panions. When the mist rolls away from the mountains, 
and the landscape stands suddenly revealed, we find that 
Nature always has Beauty for her end. However long and 
dreary may be the winter, we are always indemnified by the 
spring — ^not merely by the enjoyment of it when it comes, 
but by the anticipation. So with the mists and wintry days 
of life ; while they last they are paiaful, but their clearing 
away is glorious, and we find that they are only veils and 
forerunners of something bright. Nature never forgets her 
sestivalia, nor Divine love its compensations. The common 
course of things, says Paley, is uniformly in favor of happi- 
ness. Happiness is the rule, misery the exception. Else 
would our attention be called to examples of wealth and 
comfort, instead of disease and want. 

155. Giving full, fair play to the intellect and afiections, 
we not only discover what it is to live, and how easy to live 
happily ; but the period of our existence upon earth ceases 
to be short, and becomes immensely long. It is only the 
life of the body which is short, or need be so. Real, human 
life, is immeasurable, if we will have it so. Each day, 
remarks Goethe in his autobiography, is a vessel into which 
a great deal may be poured, if we will actually _^^^ it up; 
that is, with thoughts and feelings, and their expression into 
deeds, as elevated and amiable as we can reach to. It needs 
little reflection to perceive that life truly consists only in 
such exercises. "The mere lapse of years is not life. To 
eat, and drink, and sleep, to be exposed to the darkness and 



"WE LIVE IN DEEDS." 253 

the liglit, to pace round the mill of habit, and turn the wheel 
of wealth; to make reason our book-keeper, and convert 
thought into an implement of trade; this is not life. In all 
this but a poor fraction of the consciousness of humanity is 
awakened, and the sanctities still slumber which make it 
most worth while to be. Knowledge, truth, love, beauty, 
goodness, faith, alone give vitality to the mechanism of ex- 
istence."* 

Grandly expressed iu "Festus." 

Life's more than breath, and the quick round of blood ; 

'Tis a great spirit and a busy heart. 

We live in deeds, not years ; in thoughts, not breaths ; 

In feelings, not in figures on a dial. 

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives 

Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. 

To measure life by years is, to the true liver, to measure it 
rather by ages. If we do not feel its immensity, it is to con- 
fess to inactivity and slumber. When we would ask our- 
selves how old we are, we should find that we must cast up, 
not anniversaries, but days and hours; and satisfy ourselves 
how long our life has already been, should reflect, not on 
the mere animal adjuncts of life, but on the books we have 
read, the agreeable objects we have had before our eyes, the 
pleasant places we have visited, the intercourses of friendship 
by which our hearts have been made glad ; together with 
the aspirations which have ennobled, and the hopes which 
have cheered us. We should "taste in thought again" the 
sweet hours spent by the sea, in the green fields, and in the 
woods, and the shining, balmy, fragrant moments, each in 
itself a little summer, brought by the tones, the smiles, the 
touch, of our Beloved. These are the things that make Life. 



* Martineau, "Endeavors after the Christian Life." 

22 



254 AGE NO MATTER OF BIRTH-DAYS. 

The study even of a single science adds many years to one's 
biography. For he who busies himself with chemistry, or 
botany, or geology, enjoys a thousand pleasant thoughts in 
the same space of clock-time wherein the indolent and incu- 
rious know but one; and every onward step in discovery 
becomes a new elixir vitoe. The invention of logarithms, 
says Laplace, has "lengthened the life of the astronomer." 
As truly may it be said that the invention of the microscope 
has lengthened the life of the physiologist. Age, accord- 
ingly, or, as it would be better to call it, oldness, in its high- 
est idea, is no mere matter of birth-days. The oldest man, 
truly so called, is he who, giving a free and cheerful recog- 
nition to life, in its depth, variety, and majesty, has enjoyed 
the largest number of agreeable spiritual experiences, and 
retains them vividly before his mind. 

156. "Old," in the popular sense of aged and decrepid as 
to body, denotes a state of things which pertains to man 
only in his animal, temporal relations. This kind of oldness 
goes along with eating, drinking, and so forth; the idea of 
it, therefore, should be wholly detached from the mind when 
we would think of man in his highest or spiritual reality. 
The soul that is in right order concerns itself little about 
physical age, no more than about death ; for youth and life 
pre'dccupy its interest. Neither does it feel old age to be an 
evil. Physical old age, like mortality, is afflictive in pro- 
portion to the want of inward strength to fall back upon. 
"It is painful," says one who has proved the value of such 
strength, "it is painful to grow old, to lose by degrees the 
suppleness, strength, and activity of the body; to perceive 
each day our organs becoming weaker; but when we feel 
that the soul, constantly exercised, becomes daily more 
reflective, more mistress of herself, more skilful to avoid, 
more strong to sustain, without yielding to the shock of 
accidents, gaining on the one hand what we lose upon the 



THE TIME FOR ENJOYMENT NEVER PASSED. 255 

other, then we are no longer sensible of growing old." If 
the soul be not young, youth as to birth-clays has no advan- 
tage over senility. To men who have no resource in them- 
selves for being happy, every age is burdensome ; and were 
those who complain of the shortness of life as bringing them 
so soon to the weakness and torpidity of old age, to live for 
seven hundred years instead of seventy, they would be none 
the better off. People past their bodily prime are often 
heard complaining of the decline and degeneracy of things. 
Since they were young, they say, the world has lost its old 
simplicities, beauty is tarnished, and novelty at an end. 
What does it amount to? Simply, that "they who utter 
these dismal ditties have not cared to keep alive the sympa- 
thies which carry a man along with his age ; that they have 
not cultivated a habit of genial observation, but have shut 
themselves up in self and sophistication, under the delusion 
that the pleasures of youth belong only to the young in 
years. Foolish and lamentable error. If men have little 
or no pleasure in their experience of the changes which are 
brought by increase of years, it is because they are not good 
and wise enough to find and contemplate the past in the 
present, and thus induce a sweet and meditative continuity 
of earliest life." Dullness is not in lapse of years, but in the 
unskilful use of them; the tedium of a long journey is not 
in the miles, but in the complainer; if time be tiresome, it 
is because we do not spin amusement out of ourselves, as 
silkworms spin their silk. With the man who has really 
lived, the time is never past for sublime pleasures. Though 
many he enjoyed in his youth may no longer be accessible, 
by reason of his failing muscles, his capacity for the attain- 
able is free and buoyant to the last. 

My heart leaps up when I behold 
The rainbow in the sky ! 



256 THE INTELLECT IN ADVANCED LIFE. 

So was it when I was a boy ; 
So is it now I am a man ; 
So be it when I shall grow old, 
Or let me die ! 

157. While true old age is that honorable and happy 
state of soul which intellectual and emotional activities in- 
duce, there is thus another oldness which comes of those 
activities being checked in their very start, or turned astray 
from the course wherein alone are youth and life. How 
many are there who have scarcely run a score of birth-days, 
yet are already sere in spirit! How many are there, again, 
who, though the snow may have long whitened the moun- 
tain tops, are green with all the spring freshness of thought 
and feeling, and who dispel, by their manner, all idea of 
their being "old." Time, necessarily, nowhere implies 
youth : Time, necessarily, makes no one old. Those who are 
old at sixty or seventy are not made old by lapse of years; 
they have been old ever since they were twenty or thirty. 
Doubtless, here and there, men are made old by the attrition 
of care and distress on account of others, — and none are 
more to be sympathized with than these; but in the majority 
of cases, the oldness we are speaking of comes of sloth or 
weakness, the result probably of crushing injuries in early 
years — ^bad school discipline taking the first place, — or it 
comes of indifference to religious principle, and thus of 
giving way to "envy, hatred and malice;" since nothing 
sooner cankers and shrivels the spirit than uncharitable, un- 
generous, and selfish habits of will. That which makes old, 
in the sense of loss of youth of spirit, is not Time, but the 
consuming action of evil passions, or neglecting to nourish 
the mind with wisdom. Youth, under right culture, may be 
preserved to the very last. Is it not promised to the obe- 
dient, that "the child shall die an hundred years old?" 
" Age," well observes Mr. Dendy, in his nice little book. The 



AGE A RELATIVE TERM. 257 

Pilgrimage of Thouglit, "is a mere relative term, and ought 
not to be employed quoad time, but quoad condition. A 
thousand disturbing causes may reduce to apathy or imbe- 
cility the opening intellect of youth ; and repose, or manage- 
ment, or habits of devotion, may render it perennial and 
energetic to the very close of life." How many and splendid 
are the examples of the latter! Mason, on his seventy- 
second birth-day, wrote one of the most beautiful sonnets in 
our language. Jussieu employed himself, between his 
eighty-third and eighty-eighth year, in dictating a new edi- 
tion of his Introduction to Botany; and this not in his 
mother tongue, but in choice Latin. Goethe was four-score 
when he completed the second part of Faust. The late 
Marquis Wellesley was nearly or quite eighty-two when he 
produced tljose extraordinary verses, — 

O Fons Salutis ! Vita ! Fides mea ! 

158. Youth, in fact, viewed as to its essential qualities, is 
not a state into which we are born, and which we grow out 
of, and leave behind, but a state to which we gradually ad- 
vance. We are born old, not young. "We enter the world 
blind, deaf, senseless, emotionless, passionless, ignorant; all 
which conditions are characteristic of oldness, and are repre- 
sentatively expressed in the bald head, the toothless gums, 
the tottering gait, and the dozen other physical infirmities 
and negations which belong alike to senility and infancy. 
By degrees only do we become young, learning in succession 
to observe, to wish, to will, to think, to love, to hope. If 
the expanding intellect and affections be affixed, under 
kindly guidance, to what is truthful and good, youth spreads 
its wings, and goes on growing in everlasting life; if they be 
affixed, under vicious or repressing influences, to what is 
base or ignoble, the beautiful progression is arrested, and 
the spirit relapses into its original, vacant old age. How it 

22 « 



258 CULTURE OF THE AFFECTIONS. 

is that "the angels are for ever growing younger," we may 
readily understand by noting the history of the soul which 
earnestly and prayerfully seeks and strives to be angelic; 
for this is a history of forsaking the evil and choosing the 
good, bringing youth as its result, and foretelling on earth 
the law of heaven. 

159. Now to attain to this happy state of youth, and thus 
virtually to lengthen life, requires but that the spiritual 
energies of our nature should be allowed full, fair play. 
Giving them their due, old age itself, called dark and feeble, 
may yet be rendered lovely. It is not only the " mind " or 
vinderstanding that must be cultivated ; the heart must be 
attended to no less carefully. Nothing is more importaat to 
remember in reference to self-culture, than that intellectual 
pursuits call forth only half our nature. True, they infuse 
a wonderful duration into life as exercises of the attention, 
the memory, and the agreeable power of investigating the 
relations of things. But in order to the full realization of 
life, there is needed also the play of the affections. We 
must love, as well as think, in order truly to live. Bad as 
is intellectual sloth, to neglect the cultivation of the feelings 
is worse. There is no idleness so ruinous as that of the 
heart. By the affections, as already said, is not meant love 
towards certain of our fellow-creatures only, and preemi- 
nently towards One ; though this, next to love of the Father 
of all, is their most excellent activity. The affections are 
the dispositions of the Will, love to one's wife, and child, 
and neighbor, forming a part of them. The dispositions of 
the Will give quality and intensity to a man's life in a much 
higher degree than do the perceptions of the understanding. 
"Show me what thou truly lovest," says Fichte, in that 
beautiful book, The Way to the Blessed Life, "show me 
what thou truly lovest, show me what thou seekest and 
strivest for with thy whole heart, when thou hopest to attain 



LIFE IS LOVE. . 259 

to true enjoyment, and thou hast hereby shown me thy life. 
"What thou lovest, is that thou livest. This very love is 
thy life, the root, the seat, the central point of thy being." 
Nothing is attainable unless we love it. " We can sometimes 
love that which we do not understand, but it is impossible 
clearly to understand what we do not love." Learn to love 
well is therefore the first and golden rule of wisdom. Our 
true birth-day is when we begin consciously to love the good 
and comely, and our true birth-place the scene of that love's 
arising. Eve, rather than Adam, was called "Life," 
though our first father, considered physically, was equally 
if not more deserving of the name, because in woman the 
Afiections predominate, as in man the intellectual powers. 
Loss of the power of loving is loss of life. Directly we cease 
to love a thyig, it no longer has any of the beauty of life for 
us, nor, though the hands may still possess it, can we any 
longer call it our own. Affection, therefore, alone makes 
possession sacred. No man can avoid loving, nor can he 
avoid loving that which God gave him for his affections' 
chief delight. Hence it was that the monks, when they 
made their vow of celibacy, and refused to love woman in 
her proper person, still were unable to escape loving her in 
the ideal, and took her image in the Virgin, able to dispense 
so much the more easily with the genuine, the more ardently 
they attached themselves to the imaginary. To love the 
Virgin may be pious, abstractedly, and may bring many 
pleasant thoughts ; but real, practical piety, as well as wis- 
dom, is to get a terrestrial wife, and love her. You have 
the advantage, to say the least, of her society. As Adolphe 
Karr says, in "A Tour round my Garden," talking of the 
Hamadryads, " I love women under trees, not in them." True 
reason and religion have an eye for the earth as well as for 
heaven. Like the cedar of Lebanon, they have their 
branches turned to the sky, and soaring beautifiilly, but 



260 LIFE IS LOVE. 

they have their roots in the soil beneath. Hence then the 
great and imj)regnable axiom that Life is Love. Commonly 
restricted to the play of the amative and philoprogenitive 
feelings, Love properly denotes the energy, in a happy and 
beautiful direction, of the entire spiritual nature. It is in 
this high, impartial, unsensual sense of the word, of course, 
that we are to be understood as using it. In a derivative 
sense, it denotes also the ruling desire of a man ; that dispo- 
sition of the will which is predominant with him, and which 
may or may not be in concord with the intellect. Every 
man has such a desire. It is ever secretly present to him, 
and, though he may be immediately occupied with some- 
thing else, unconsciously governs all his actions. 

160. Every one proves that life is love : — that we live 
only when in union with what we love. Do we not feel it 
daily ? Absence from what we love is not life, but only 
dull, uninteresting time. " It is but a little part of our life 
that we live," says an ancient poet ; " the whole space of it 
is not life, but time only."* Many are the sayings which 
record how wide-spread has been this experience : — Vita in 
exilio vitalis non esi.f Nee voluptas sine vita, nee vita sine 
voluptate. Life away from that which makes the enjoyment 
of life, the Greeks called /9/oc dj3co(;, " lifeless life." When 
others of the ancients shouted, " King, live forever !" it 
was but a metaphorical way of saying, " O King ! so long 
as you live, may you be prosperous and happy !" Life and 



* Menander, in a fragment preserved by Stobseus, Sententice, Tom. 
2, Tit. 108. 

f Thus Romeo, — 

There is no world without Verona's walls, 

But purgatory, torture, hell itself. 

Hence banished is banish'd from the world. 

And world's exile is death. 



LIFE AND TIME, 261 

well-being are in their briefest definition, union "with the ob- 
ject of our love ; death and ill-being are the reverse. The 
poet addresses his beloved as — " My life ! my soul !" but 
what does he in this beyond clothing in speech what all 
men utter silently ? Whatever be the object of our leading 
affection, where the heart is, there too is our life ; and as we 
are beings directly constituted for sympathy and intimate 
communion with one of complementary sex, life is real to 
us in the degree that there is least absolute separation from 
the chosen. They only can be truly said to live who have 
a faithful heart to receive and reciprocate the outpouring 
of their own. It is because all life, whether physical, physi- 
ological or spiritual, is a state of marriage, or the union of 
two complementary forces, acting and reacting ; and because 
all marriage, rightfully so called, is life ; that the bitterest 
of privations is prolonged severance from one's other self, 
and the sweetest of delights, reunion and companionship 
with her. The presence of those we love is a double life. 
Hence also the enthusiasm of the lover, emphatically so 
called, when in the society of his beloved ; and his pining 
loneliness when away from her ; — her own enthusiasm, her 
own solitude, no less. " Five days," says Clemanthe, — 

" Five days, 
Five melancholy days I have not seen him." 

To the genuinely fond and faithful, the world has in it two 
places only — that where she is, and that where she is not. 
Yet has the lover his gay as well as his lonely hours, since 
the love which is his life beguiles the mind into one long 
unbroken thought of the beloved, and since into every 
thought and affection of human nature enter both summer 
and winter. The summer of his absence is whenever he 
sees what is beautiful, whether in nature or art, for the 
Beautiful is ever the likeness of her he loves. He goes into 



262 CONJUGAL LOVE. 

the still country, and other men see flowers, and clear 
streams, and golden and purple sunsets, he only sees the fea- 
tures of the wished-for. Who that has read Eloisa cannot 
but remember St. Preux in the Valais ? 

Te loquor absentum : te vox mea nominat unam ! 
Nulla venit sine te nox mihi, nulla dies ! 

(Ovid. Tristia, Lib. iii. El. iii.) 

" Thee, beloved consort, I talk to, far away ; thee alone does my 
voice name ; no night, no day, comes to me uncheered by thy sweet 
vision." 

161. But the brilliant charms of sexal love, and the 
richly glad life which it fashions, are not the lot of all. 
That many of both sexes should remain celibate all their 
lives is something more than an accident. It is an arrange- 
ment of Providence for great and benevolent uses which it 
is not difficult to estimate. Moreover, of no one of youthful 
years can it be affirmed that they shall unquestionably en- 
joy the life which comes of sexal love. Therefore is it wis- 
dom to encourage those other loves which, though they may 
not cast upon our pilgrimage an equal radiance, are solid, 
substantial, enduring, independent of time and place. 
These are, first, the love of the performance of good uses, in 
the lecture-room, the Sunday-school, the domestic circle, 
wherever, in a word, there may be opportunity of sharing 
with others what Providence has blessed us with, each one 
according to his aptitude and ability ; secondly, the love of 
nature. Cultivating these loves, the intellect itself expands 
and grows wealthier. If the love of these things can be en- 
joyed along with the love that has its root in sexal differ- 
ence, it is a joy untold. " Life," says Schiller, writing to 
his friend Korner, " life at the side of a beloved wife is a 
different thing from what it is to one who is alone — even in 
summer. Now, for the first time, I can thoroughly enjoy 



CONJUGAL LOVE. 263 

Nature, and in her, myself too." A wife should be chosen 
for " her own sweet sake alone," but if the choice be true, we 
secure at the same moment, an enlarged aptitude for all mi- 
nor loves. All minor loves indeed, after some mode or 
other, enter into and become a part of true, fond conjugal 
love, which thus procures to its possessors a summary or 
compend of all the riches of the world. " With persons 
whom we love," says one of the most charming of authors, 
" sentiment fortifies the mind as well as the heart ; and they 
who are thus attached, have little need to search for ideas 
elsewhere." — (J. J. Eousseau. Confessions, Part ii., Book 2.) 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE AFFECTIONS IN MEIATION TO IIFE. lOVE OF NA- 
TURE. 

162. First then, as to good uses. No man is happier 
than he who loves and fulfills that particular work for the 
world which falls to his share. Even though the full under- 
standing of his work, and of its ultimate value, may not be 
present with him; if he but love it, — always assuming that 
his conscience approves, — it brings an abounding satisfac- 
tion. Indeed, we none of us fully comprehend our office, 
nor the issue we are working for. To man is entrusted the 
nature of his actions, not the result of them. This, God 
keeps out of our sight. The most trivial act doubtless goes 
to the promotion of a multitude of ends, distant it may be 
to ourselves, but only as the leaves of a tree are distant from 
their supplying rootlets. And therefore does it behoove us to 
be diligent in our several spheres. We should work like the 
bees, sedulous to collect all the honey within our reach, but 
leaving to Providence to order what shall come of it. The 
good which our exertions effect, may rarely or never become 
visible. In teaching, which is the readiest of good uses, 
how often does all exertion seem in vain. Our duty is never- 
theless to go on, and strive to do all we can. "Every nian," 
says Fichte, in the beautiful book already quoted, "every 
man should go on working, never debating within himself, 
nor wavering in doubt, Avhether it may succeed, but labor as 
if of necessity it must succeed." Between the result of single 

264 



GOOD ENDEAVORS NEVER WASTED. 265 

efforts and the end we have in view, and the magnitude of 
the obstacles to be overcome, there may often appear a large 
and painful disproportion; but we must not allow ourselves 
to be discouraged by seemings; warm, hearty, sunny endea- 
vor will unfailingly meet with its reward. Good uses are 
never without result. Once enacted, they become a part of 
the moral world; they give to it new enrichment and beauty, 
and the whole universe partakes of their influence. They 
may not return in the shape wherein played forth, but like- 
lier after the manner of seeds, which never forget to turn to 
flowers. " Philosophers tell us that since the creation of the 
world, not one particle of matter has been lost. It may 
have passed into new shapes, it may have combined with 
other elements, it may have floated away in vapor; but it 
comes back some time, in the dew-drop or the rain, helping 
the leaf to grow, and the fruit to swell ; through all its wan- 
derings and transformations Providence watches over and 
directs it. So is it with every generous and self-denying 
effort. It may escape our observation, and be utterly for- 
gotten; it may seem to have been utterly in vain, but it has 
painted itself on the eternal world, and is never effaced." 
Nothing that has the ideas and principles of heaven in it 
can die or be fruitless. 

Talk not of wasted affection ; affection never was wasted ; 

If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning 

Back to their spring, like the rain, shall fill it full of refreshment; 

That which the fountain sends forth, returns again to the fountain.* 

Carlyle, in that extraordinary book, Sartor Resartus, shows 
us that it is from our work we gain most of our self-know- 
ledge, — one of the most important desiderata of life. " Our 



* See a beautiful theory of the Fine Arts, founded on these great 
truths, in Mrs. Child's Letters from New York. 
23 M 



266 LOVE OF NATURE. 

works," he says, " are the mirror within which the spirit first 
sees its natural lineaments. 'Know thyself is an impossi- 
ble precept till it be translated into this partially possible 
one, Know what thou canst work at." Work is obedience, 
and self-knowledge is invaluable, and thus is proved over 
again that duty and interest are but two names for one fact. 
163. Secondly, as to the "love of nature." This is not 
to be understood technically. People who by its exercise 
carry their youth along with them, may not prove to be 
botanists or geologists. Quite as likely they will not. But 
it will rarely prove that they have not accustomed them- 
selves to an earnest and constant friendship with that of 
which geology, and botany, and all sciences, barely as such, 
are only the husks and coverings. They have lived in that 
which is the spirit and life of all love and all knowledge — 
the Poetic sentiment. They have lived in the poetry of 
common things; not necessarily in written poetry, but in the 
love of the omnipresent ingredients of poetry existing 
throughout creation, and which are the ingredients likewise 
of all science and philosophy, sacred and moral as well as 
physical; whereby, in fact, they are true poets, though they 
may never have written a single verse. They have learned, 
in a word, to feel and to see; — arts which, though they may 
seem, native and universal, and which, exercised after the 
manner of quadrupeds, are common enough, in reality are 
rarely practiced. Happy the man whose walk, in calm 
April evenings, is arrested by the odor from the opening 
buds of the balsam poplar. Happy again, who, when he 
visits the sea-side, is quick to the 

Crimson weeds which spreading flow, 
Or lie like pictures on the sand below ; 
With all those bright red pebbles that the sun 
Through the small waves so softly shines upon. 



POETRY OF COMMON THINGS. 267 ' 

There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a minute 
knowledge of nature is requisite either to the love or to the 
enjoyment of it. Every man who in his walks derives 
pleasure from the common things of creation, who looks to 
the fields, the woods, the mountains, and the things that are 
therein, and reflects upon what he sees, has the true spirit 
of the naturalist within him, and so far is a botanist and 
geologist ; thereby is he proved also to be of poetic tempera- 
ment, for in these objects is the soul of poetry contained ; 
it is from no other that the poet draws his inspiration, since 
in nature is the only ftmd of great ideas. " Persons," says 
the author of Kathemerina, "who in regard to science may 
be a whole encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world — who 
do not know where to look for the Bear, or the place of a 
single star, may yet have as much pleasure in the sight of 
nature as those who know its secrets ; the poetry of common 
life does not require men to be versed in philosophy ; Nature 
never intended thait all her children should be engaged in 
what are pompously called ' solid studies.' " In these com- 
mon things of earth lies far more power to delight us than 
people in general know of. All possess them in some sort, 
as all possess the atmosphere ; but few appreciate them so 
highly as they deserve, or extract the full value from them. 
How beautifully is their worth acknowledged in the Song 
of the Three Children — " O all ye works of the Lord, bless 
ye the Lord !" Strange to say, the educated classes seem 
rather to dislike than to favor common things. They seem 
to prefer the maxim qaoe. rara, cava. Not so the man of 
genius. Him we may almost recognize by his sympathy 
with the familiar and unpretending. The finest understand- 
ings, and the noblest souls, says Charron, are the most uni- 
versal and free. Accustomed to behold the grand whole of 
things, to such minds all alike "discourse sweet music." 
Whether it be the objects of nature, or the hearts of man- 



268 CHARM OF SIMPLE-MINDEDNESS. 

kind, the simple and plain are as pleasing as the great and 
lustrous. To him, in fact, who realizes the beauty and the 
freshness of common things, who looks with love upon 
nature in all its developme^its, not questioning within himself 
whether any particular part is more pleasing than another, 
but attaching himself to the whole, as a great and beautiful 
power capable of imparting purest joy, there is never any 
need to search for pleasure ; 

The meanest floweret of tlie vale, 
The simplest note that swells the gale, 
The common sun, the air, the skies, 
To him are opening Paradise. 

Hence too we find such minds taking fullness of delight in 
little children, their pretty faces, and innocent smiling ges- 
tures ; glad also to hold intercourse with what are called 
"common people," who so far from being the "vulgar 
people" of the world, include no small portion of " nature's 
aristocracy." The vulgar are not necessarily the -ignorant, 
but the proud and the selfish, whatever their rank in society. 
The pleasure such minds receive, they shed around. As 
men of genius have faith and joy in simple minds, so these 
latter, " timid before the crowd, mute before merely clever 
people, feel quite at ease in the presence of a man of genius. 
There is a sympathy of simplicity between them." Beau- 
tifiil as are the letters of the highly-cultivated, none are so 
sweet and touching as those that breathe the feelings and 
sentiments of the simple-minded, especially of the kind- 
hearted, amiable woman, whose insight and education 
qualify her to appreciate her husband, without ever aspiring 
to compete with him. " Heaven only knows how many 
simple letters from simple-minded women, have been kissed, 
cherished, wept over, by men of far loftier intellect So 
will it always be to the end of time. It is a lesson worth 



THE ESSENCE OP POETRY. 269 

learning by those young creatures who seek to allure by 
their accomplishments, or dazzle with their wit, that though 
he may admire, no man ever loves a woman for these things. 
He loves her for what is essentially distinct from, though by 
no means incompatible with them — her woman's nature and 
her woman's heart, guileless, simple, and unaffected. This 
is why we so often see a man of high intellectual power 
passing by the De Staels and Corinnes to take into his 
bosom some way-side flower, who has nothing on earth to 
make her worthy of him, except that she is, what so few of 
your 'female celebrities' are — a true woman." In fine, 
whoever teaches us how to enjoy common things, is our 
greatest benefactor. So to represent familiar objects as to^ 
awaken the minds of others to that freshness of feeling con- 
cerning them which is the great privilege of genius, is one 
of the divinest uses human nature can fulfill. 

164. It is the very same poetic sentiment which shows 
itself in the love of good uses; also in genuine sexal love. 
It is the same, indeed, which forms the mainspring of true 
intellectual activity. Wherever any spiritual energy is so 
exercised as to realize to a man the glory and blessedness of 
Life, it is the Poetic sentiment seeking to express itself. 
Therefore would it be no misuse of terms to say that, in its 
genuine realization, life is Poetry ; that divine habitude of 
soul which " lifts the veil from before the hidden beauty of 
the world, and makes familiar things be as though they 
were not familiar;" which, discerning the holiness, the love- 
liness, the bright side of all things, makes joy more joyful 
and sorrow less sad, gives new comeliness to virtue and reli- 
gion, and "makes the whole human race grow more noble 
in our eyes." The very essence of poetry lies in its power 
to beautify and exalt, and what is this but to lift into a 
higher realization of life? 
23 * 



270 THE IMAGINATION IN REFERENCE TO LIFE. 

We live by admiration, hope, and love ; 
And even as these are well and wisely fixed, 
In dignity of being we ascend. 

Therefore also is perennial youth identified with the encou- 
ragement and culture, primarily, of the Imagination, one of 
heaven's most gracious gifts to man, and therefore one of the 
most practically useful. Concerned not only with science, 
and the penetration of the secrets of nature. Imagination is 
a first essential to human happiness. It is by the play of 
the imagination, unconsciously it may be, that we are 
strengthened for the common avocations of life, and that 
they are rendered not only untiresome, but agreeable; it is 
by the play of the imagination, no less unconsciously it may 
be, that every emotion of pleasure is vitalized. Knowledge 
in itself, feeling in itself, is inanimate. How lovely the 
rose! Where is the man who is indifierent to it? Yet the 
rose does not please simply because it is red, nor because so 
fragrant, nor because of its configuration, nor even from the 
combination of all these properties. It pleases because the 
imagination connects it with something human and divine, 
probably the cheek of woman. "Divine," we say, because 
the imagination is the faculty which preeminently links us 
to heaven, its proper home; and because whatever is vitally 
and essentially human is an expression of something con- 
tained in Him of whom man is the image and likeness. 
More nearly than we suppose is imagination connected with 
morality and religion. So with everything else that men 
delight in. The senses view one thing, the imagination 
views another — higher, lovelier, immortal. Whatever seems 
to gratify, by pleasing the senses, owes its charms to the 
pencil of the incomparable artist within. An "unimagina- 
tive man," absolutely so styled, or self-styling, is a non- 
existence. Some individuals may be more imaginative than 
others, but absolute unimaginativeness is one of the nega- 



EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF NATURAL HISTORY, 271 

tions which degrade brutes. Imagination is the very essence 
of Hope, without which there is no life. Holding fast when 
all other parts are threatened with destruction, and bidding 
defiance to the storms of devastation, Hope, the rebuilder 
and regenerator, fresh, every morning, like the manna from 
heaven, represents, in the little world of man, the sanatory 
powers which maintain nature in its total. Spero, "I hope," 
is the same word as spiro, "I breathe;" spes is only another 
name for the "breath of life."* He who has no future in 
prospect, is already dead. Life is one incessant wish to live 
"in the thick of all we desire, some day, and meanwhile we 
do live there as well as hope and imagination can con- 
trive it." 

165. The love of nature, if we would prove how long and 
beautiful it makes existence, must not be left as a mere 
amusement that can be taken to at any time. Like the love 
of virtue, it must be commenced in youth. A man may 
learn a language or a science when he is grown up, but he 
cannot then learn to love nature. This love he must bring 
with him from his boyhood, when it germinates in all, 
though with most dried up in its earliest leaf How many 
who have mildewed and rusted amid the mock pleasures of 
towns, would fain return, when too late, to their first, young 
love. Doubtless every man carries with him some remnant 
of his early love for nature, but it is not that deep, animating 
love which, by its freshness and fullness, keeps the heart 
green. Vitally to afiect us, it must grow with our growth, 
and strengthen with our strength. Hence the paramount 



* Our English word "hope" conveys precisely the same idea, 
being cognate with the word "gape," that is, to open the mouth wide 
in order to breathe freely. The exchange of g and A is a very com- 
mon occurrence; "give" and "have," for instance, are etymolo- 
gically tlie same. 



272 LEARN TO OBSERVE. 

value, in the education of youth, of Natural History; or at 
least of a fostering of the native taste in the human heart 
for the poetical contemplation of natural objects and pheno- 
mena. " Let everything be taught a girl," says one of the 
most sagacious of educationists, " let everything be taught a 
girl," and a boy as well, "which forms and exercises the 
habit of attention, and the power of judging things by the 
eye. Consequently, Botany, that inexhaustible, tranquil, 
ever-interesting science, attaching the mind to nature with 
bonds of flowers. Then Astronomy, not the properly ma- 
thematical, but the Lichtenbergian and religious, which with 
the expansion of the universe, expands the mind."* Espe- 
cially should these things be taught to the children of the 
poor, whose means of indulgence in costly pleasures are so 
scanty. There is not a child who does not delight in wild 
flowers, and whose intelligence cannot be led, if kindly dealt 
with, to find in Botany a pleasure which of all others re- 
quires least outlay of time and money, and is most easily 
and permanently within reach. To suppose that the poor 
are less able to learn than the rich, that they have not 
"minds" for such things, and that they are adapted only for 
operatives and domestic servants, is most thoughtless. Many 
a servant girl has as much taste and talent as her mistress 
and the young ladies. 

166. It is the forming and strengthening this habit of at- 
teniion which stamps so much efficiency on natural history, 
even in its most prosaic pursuit. When Solomon tells us 
with all our gettings to " get understanding," it is but an- 
other way of saying. Learn to observe. One of the chief 
functions, therefore, of the instructor of youth, if unable to 
communicate positive knowledge of natural objects, should 
be so to consolidate the interest of the youthful mind in 



J. P. Kichter. Levana, or the Doctrine of Education, p. 255. 



HOW TO KEEP THE HEART YOUNG. 273 

what of its own free will it is never slow to observe, that the 
country shall continue, what it may be to all, a perennial 
gladness and solace, not unintelligently, but because 
thronged with old friends. A human heart can never grow^ 
old if it bring with it from its childhood a lively interest in 
the re-appearance of spring flowers, the habits of birds and 
insects, the changing tints of the October leaves. The natu- 
ralist's poem is the Pleasures of Memory and the Pleasures 
of Hope both in one. He has always a to-morrow to his 
pleasures, whereas with most there is only a yesterday and 
to-day. Let the young not neglect or despise these sweet 
pleasures, and they will find that when old they will not de- 
part from them. Unhappily, children's love of nature is 
for the most part not only not encouraged, but checked and 
deadened. How else is it that the mass of mankind — say 
only of the "educated" and well-to-do — how else is it that 
they are so indifferent to the works of creation, except in so 
far as they can be made to subserve some selfish end? Who 
is to blame ? Not He who gave them, for nothing is put in 
the presence of mankind that the universal human intellect 
may not appreciate. Neither is it from lack of opportunity 
or invitation. It is the half-system of teaching which, born 
of the ruling half-system of theology, loves to dwell with it 
among the tombs, instead of coming out into the light and 
pure air of genuine philosophy and genuine Christianity. 
The poor lad - of the streets, to whom the very daisy and 
buttercup are strange exotics, whose holiday is with marbles 
down in the dust, is in vital education no worse off* than 
many a little gentleman who gets his prizes for Latin* 



* No sort of disparagement of Latin is here intended. We know 
its value too well. But how inordinately and ridiculously the dead 
languages have been honored, to the almost total exclusion of other 
branches of knowledge, is suificiently notorious. See the clever ar- 

M * 



274 CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 

Drill a boy at mere book-lessons, and the chances are that 
either he becomes a pedant, or disgusted with learning and 
books for the whole of his life after ; whereas in using natu- 
ral history as a lever of education, you secure numberless 
and most happy opportunities for communicating both 
knowledge and the taste for it, together with just and amia- 
ble sentiments. It is one of the best of mental disciplines. 
No mere pastime for the observation and the memory, na- 
tural history, pursued seriously and connectedly, calls for 
the activity of every faculty of the mind. To take a grass 
or a fern, and determine in succession its family, genus, and 
species, is in fact, an educational exercise little, if at all in- 
ferior to the verification of a theorem of Euclid. Let there 
be a deep, unsophisticated love of nature, and it will even 
serve in the place of much that is commonly called educa- 
tion. How much grace and dignity does the love of nature 
give to minds in other respects simple and scantily furnished, 
especially in females. There may be no learning, there may 
be no " accomplishments," but if there be a deep, fond love 
of nature, it compensates for the want of all, and we find a 
more lively and engaging companionship than in the society 
of the profonndest scholar who is void of it. People should 
cultivate this love, and bring up their children in it, if they 
would but realize the full beauty of the commonest objects 
of household ornament. Nobody knows how to like shells 
who has not collected them on the firm wet sand uncovered 
by the retiring waves. Nobody knows how to like flowers 
who has not gathered primroses beneath the tender foliage 
of the spring. Where, moreover, we find this love present, 
we may take it as a sign of still better things, seeing that its 



tide in the Westminster Eeview for October, 1853, on Classical 
Education, its use and abuse ; or better still, Mr. Chapman's reprint 
of it, with the appendix of extracts from cotemporary writers. 



NATURAL HISTORY. 275 

very province is to refine. When, on entering a house, you 
see a few choice flowers tastefully arranged, you may expect 
a shelf of wise and good books not far off. And so with the 
manifestation of the soul. 

167. The love of nature requires no peculiar circum- 
stances. Its sphere is wherever the sun is shining, because 
it addresses itself to what the listless call weeds and stones, 
finding poetry and delight where the dull cry all is barren. 
It revels in a glorious landscape, but where the landscape is 
not, it constructs one in miniature for itself. Nothing in 
the world is absolutely uninteresting to it, nor can be — what 
is there indeed that, in any relation, has lost its primal qua- 
lity of " very good ?" What is there that we should not es- 
teem it a privilege to possess, although it be " common ?" 
Is it nothing to have the frost-flowers on the window-panes ? 
Is it nothing to have the blue sky ? Is it nothing to have 
the stars and the rainbow? Oh, what grand and awfol 
things surround us, if we will but look forth upon them ! 
But because they are " without money and without price," 
we make nought of them; refusing to enjoy, because accept- 
ance and admiration alone are asked. That sublime sense 
of the wonderful which they excite in us when children, is 
one of the sentiments we should most anxiously keep alive. 
When we cease to view with interest the familiar phenomena 
of nature, its rarest and grandest lose in charm. Why do 
not preachers speak more of these things ? If the oflice of 
religious teaching be to amend man's heart, surely the study 
of the works of God, as well as of his word, deserves some 
little notice and recommendation. The religious contempla- 
tion of nature has more efiicacy in this way than mere scho- 
lastic theologians suppose. " The moral constitution of 
man," beautifully observes Dr. Moore, " is so intimately in 
keeping with the outward cosmos, that it is vain to attempt 
to regulate our faculties and feelings without respect to the 



276 NATURAL HISTORY AND THE PULPIT. 

ordinances of God in the material creation."* The pulpit is 
not the place for lectures on natural history, but neither is it 
a place for discarding or forgetting it, at least after the man- 
ner of the preachers that be. " In recommending the love 
of God to us, how seldom do they refer to those things in 
"which it is most abundantly and immediately shown ! 
They insist much on his giving of bread, raiment, and 
health (which he gives to all inferior creatures), but they 
require us not to thank him for that glory of his works 
which he has permitted us alone to perceive. They tell us 
often to meditate in the closet ; but they send us not, like 
Isaac, into the fields at even. They dwell on the duty of 
self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight." To 
genuine theology nothing in the world is without signifi- 
cance ; nor is it anything unfit for citation in its discourses, 
when it would seek to interpret the word of God, and en- 
force its teachings. The test of enlightened preaching is its 
ability to " consider the lilies," and deduce from their his- 
tory religious wisdom. The great defect of what is called 
moral and religious teaching, as ordinarily carried on is, 
that it continually tells us what we are not to do, whereas 
genuine wisdom begins by giving something to he done, and 
showing how to do it. In its very simplest form, if you would 
keep a child out of mischief, set him to some interesting 
employment. " Don't do that," goes for nothing unless fol- 
lowed by " do this." That mankind may become more moral 
and religious, let those who are anxious for it, administer 
less reproof, and give in place of it, an interest in life; show 
how much there is to live for, and how easily procured. 

168. The love of nature should be cherished for the sake 
of the tranquility it induces. A man can be of importance 
to others only when he is himself happy and peaceful, and 



* Use of the Body m relation to tlie Mind. P. 163. 



MORAL INFLUENCE OF NATURE. 277 

nothing so much tends to make him so as the contemplation 
of nature. The serenity we find in the fields and the woods, 
and by clear streams, we imbibe into our own hearts, and 
thus derive from nature itself the very condition of spirit 
which is needful to the enjoyment of it. In towns we may 
find diversion, but we cannot find repose; calmness, in 
which alone can the soul put forth its leaves and blossoms, 
is for the solitudes of nature alone to give ; cheerfulness, 
which arises only from the peaceful enlightenment of the 
spirit, finds in the same its sincerest and warmest friend. 
" I wondered," says Eousseau, describing his first experience 
of this, " I wondered to find that inanimate beings should 
over-rule our most violent passions, and despised the impo- 
tence of philosophy for having less power over the soul than 
a succession of lifeless objects." It is not the prerogative 
of a few. Ask any man who has accustomed himself to 
commune with nature, and he will testify that apart from 
the intellectual culture attained by scientific acquaintance 
with its objects — and apart from the admiration of creative 
skill and goodness which they excite — there is in nature a 
nameless and subtle influence, analogous to the influence of 
human beings, and like that, acting upon us silently and 
secretly, but most powerfully. If any would prove it in his 
own person, let him go in the refulgent summer to where 
the warmth and breeze will wrap him round ; where he may 
hear the singing of birds, and the sound of leaves and 
boughs stirred by the wind, so like the grand, perpetual 
song of the sea; where he can view without effort, the 
smooth, green grass, stretching far away, interrupted only 
by masses of the heavy, sumptuous foliage of the year's 
glorious centre ; water in the distance, its ripples lighted by 
the sun ; let him go alone amid these things, or even a small 
part of them, and live with them for half an hour, then say 
seriously, if he can, that he has not felt his spirit breathed 

2d 



278 THE SPIRITUAL EVER NEAR US. 

on by some unseen Power, and ascend under that breath 
into a holier life. It is good to leave other people some- 
times, even to leave our own thoughts, and to dwell amidst 
this mysterious, powerful, moulding influence, submitting 
our whole being to it, passively. If we take calmness with 
us, that calmness transmutes into religion ; if we take 
trouble and disquietude, they melt away. "When the vex- 
ations of the world have broken in upon me," says Water- 
ton, " I go away for an hour or two amid the birds of the 
valley, and seldom fail to return with better feelings than 
when I set out." Doubtless it is true that nature is 
" colored by the spirit ;" that it dons a festive or a mourning 
garment according as its master does : that in nature of 
itself, there is nothing either sad or joyful. But none of 
this is incompatibly true. What soothes, ameliorates, and 
ennobles us when in the presence of nature, consists not in 
the objects we find there; but in the ministrations from the 
spiritual world, which, by going into that sacred and peaceful 
presence, we provide with congenial opportunity. For it is 
one of the sublimest laws of Divine Providence that spiritual 
gifts (which are influences on the heart), shall always be 
best conferred in the presence of their material representa- 
tives. Hence the institution of the representative bread 
and wine, of sacrifices on altars, of baptism, and of every 
other genuine religious rite and ceremonial. Hence likewise 
the taking of the disciples to the sea-shore, the mountain, 
and the corn-fields. The spiritual is ever near to us, but it 
is in the solitudes of nature, Avhen we are face to face with 
the unmarred works of God, that our hearts are most acces- 
sible to his inspirations. These it is which refresh us ; not 
the sunshine and the landscape : as in reading the Bible, it 
is not the reception of the words by the eye which invigor- 
ates, but that which during our reading is infused into the 
soul. Let us not unduly exalt nature. People say God 



TOWN VERSUS COUNTRY. 279 

made the country, and man made the town, as if the latter 
were altogether evil. Both have their sanctities, and both 
their mighty influence for good. How many are the sweet, 
endeared and endearing Homes, where the afiections, taste, 
elegance, and holy communings beautifully intermingle, and 
sustain each other's life. The true place to live in is a great 
city. If vice be there, and turbulence, still it is there only 
that we get society, stimulus, libraries. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE INTEZrXJCTUAZ FACVT.TIES IN RELATION TO LIFE. 

169. More readily to apprehend the nature and use of 
the spiritual faculties, especially those which belong to the 
Intellectual province of the soul, we may here briefly con- 
sider the fine correspondence which they hold with physical 
Hunger and Thirst, and the means by which the latter are 
satisfied and allayed. The hunger and thirst of the body 
represent our spiritual desires and longings; the eating and 
drinking which appease them are counterparts, respectively, 
of the solacing of the affections with what they love, and of 
the acquisition of knowledge by the understanding. Mutatis 
mutandis, all the governing principles, requirements, and ac- 
tivities of the soul and the body with regard to nourishment, 
are the same. They similarly famish under privation of 
food, and improve upon generous diet; hunger, which has 
done so much for man as a physical affection, has scarcely 
done less as a spiritual one. Figuratively, or in acknow- 
ledgment of the correspondence, we speak of feeding our 
hopes, thirsting for knowledge, listening with avidity, im- 
bibing information. When we acquire that information, we 
"digest it, — we "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest." 
How beautiful are the allusions of the poets ! 

My heart is thirsty for that noble pledge ! — Julius Ccesar, iv. 3. 
Urged by a restless longing, the hunger and thirst of the spirit. 

Evangeline. 
280 



SPIRITUAL HUNGER AND THIRST. 281 

In Ion, the pestilence-stricken, dying mother (fearing to 
communicate the infection,) forbears to give a last embrace 
to her little child, — 

Stifling the mighty hunger of the heart. 

What pathos, again, in the unhappy Lady Constance, — 

O Lord, my boy, my Arthur, my fair son ! 
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world; 
My widow's comfort, and my sorrow's care ! 

The "hunger of the heart" is not merely the longing for 
that which is beloved, but far away, or denied to it; it is 
that beautiful fervency of the affections which makes them 
yearn for something to call their own, something that shall 
be the secret joy and solace of their life. Of its very nature, 
the heart must and will have something to love and be kind 
to ; it cannot live without ; it never was intended to ; whence 
if precluded from that which it knows of and longs for, but 
cannot secure, it will half-unconsciously pet even a dog or a 
bird. In Scripture, the native land and home of all true 
poetical expression, "eating" denotes the reception in our 
souls of the love of God; "drinking" the reception of his 
wisdom; these being the Divine elements by which our 
sj)iritual nature is invigorated and sustained, and the gift of 
which was representatively expressed in the miracles of feed- 
ing the hungry. It is because all things come of the Divine 
Love and Wisdom, and because physical things universally 
are images of spiritual ones, that the bodies of all living 
creatures require both food and drink, and are constructed 
of solids and liquids, and that no vital function ever does 
or can take place except through their combined instrument- 
ality. Agreeably, thirst is used in the inspired volume to 
express desire for truth; hunger to express aspiration after 
love. "Ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, 

24 * 



282 CORRESPONDENCE OF BREAD AND WATER. 

come and eat,* yea, come, buy wine and milk without 
money and without price!" Of this present life it is said, 
"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteoxis- 
ness;" and in the Apocalypse, of the multitudes of heaven, 
that " they never more hunger nor thirst," which'means that 
in the Better Land is plenitude of wisdom and delight. 
Bread, the staff of life, is so often spoken of in the Word 
of God, because the representative of heavenly good, or 
Divine love, and because there is not a single condition of 
life in which we can dispense with that good, although we 
may not receive it consciously. A man who will not eat 
must needs die in a little time. Correspondingly, the 
spiritual life soon becomes extinct, or reduced to its lowest 
ebb, if the means which can alone support it be not used. 
Hence we are instructed to pray without ceasing, " Give us 
this day our daily bread." Ashur, says the promise, which 
all may realize, "shall always have bread." Elsewhere Je- 
hovah is described as pouring out his spirit on the earth, 
and saying, — "I will give water to those which are athirst." 
Water is the emblem of truth, as bread is of good. "Who- 
soever drinketh of the water I shall give him, shall never 
thirst." Perceiving the correspondence, in the inmost of 
our minds, we speak of truth, even colloquially, as flowing 
from a fountain, also as a sea, and an ocean. "I seem to 
myself," said Sir Isaac Newton, "to have been picking up a 
few shells upon the beach, while the great ocean of truth lay 
all undiscovered before me." 

170. Religious or theological truths universally represent 
themselves in secular things ; as the religious life needs the 
divine "flesh and blood," which "except ye eat, ye can have 
no life in you," so does the life of temporal intelligence and 



* " Eat," as applied to drinking, is similarly used by Homer, — ■ 
"eat the fat sheep and excellent sweet wine." — (II. xii. 319.) 



FOOD FOR THE MIND. 283 

emotion need its own appropriate aliments, " the food for the 
mind" so often talked of, and which true Benevolence always 
remembers to provide, by establishing the means of Educa- 
tion. To urge this latter principle would be no more than 
to dilate upon one of the oldest texts of common-sense; but 
it is not superfluous to observe that were the simple rules of 
common-sense which those who have it are so zealous in en- 
forcing upon the body, as zealously enforced upon man's 
moral and intellectual nature, they would prove the best 
practical philosophy. That "food for the mind," moreover, 
must be nutritive and wholesome. "The stalwart and florid 
components of a masculine life-hood demand the materials 
of vitalization, not those which conserve squalor. The 
intellect, as well as the body, demands strong, regular, solid, 
aliment. If the human mind," continues one of the most 
eloquent preachers of modern times, "grow dwarfish and 
enfeebled, it is, ordinarily, because left to deal with common- 
place facts, and never summoned to the effort of taking the 
span and altitude of broad and lofty disclosures. The under- 
standing will gradually bring itself down to the dimensions 
of the matters with which alone it is familiarized, till, hav- 
ing long been accustomed to contract its powers, it shall lose, 
well-nigh, the ability to expand them." Mental culture is 
thus, essentially, mental nourishment. We cannot expect to 
enjoy "strength of mind," "vigor of mind," "intellectual 
power," or by whatever other name the manly energy of the 
soul may be designated, unless we furnish it with food such 
as it can turn into swift, red blood. Neither can we expect 
to see these things if by training we do not teach the soul 
how to he hungry, which is to be done by demanding of it 
constant, tasking exercise. The laws of the body are those 
of the mind. Exercise and excitement strengthen and ener- 
gize, — though both may be carried to an extreme, and then 
be hurtftil by exhausting — indolence and habits of insensi- 



284 CURIOSITY THE APPETITE OF THE MIND. 

tiveness contract, and debilitate, and at length kill. As a 
man may always judge of his physical state of health by 
the quality of appetite with which he sits down to his meals, 
so may he of his spiritual health by the interest he feels in 
wisdom. Men who realize and thoroughly enjoy their 
animal life, do so by virtue of their good Appetite, and by 
the legitimate satisfaction of it ; they who live the higher 
life of the intellect, do so by virtue of their Curiosity, which 
is the appetite of the understanding. No man is truly 
happy who has not a large curiosity as to the beauties and 
riches of the world in which we dwell ; tempered, neverthe- 
less, with prudence as to the time, and method, and extent 
of his gratifications. Of all the evils man is subject to, 
assuredly not the least is wicuriousness ; perhaps it should 
be classed among the greatest. Certainly there is no evil 
more abounding. How many listen to philosophy, if they 
can be said to listen at all, only with polite aversion, as 
though the speaker were discoursing in an unknown tongue ; 
how many are the minds whose appetite is altogether vitiated 
and depraved, which is tantamount to being lost, turning 
away from all really substantial food as if it were so much 
poison. It needs not that a man be uneducated to be in- 
curious. It is not so much of Education commonly so 
called, that curiosity comes ; but of quickening the mind 
with life to educate itself. The customary endeavor to instil 
a large amount of mere dry, unvitalizing knowledge tends 
to repress curiosity rather than to excite it. Grammars and 
lexicons, whether of language or of' any other form of 
knowledge, serve oftener to kill than to make alive. Les- 
sons, as such, or in the sense of parrot-knowledge, are only 
"mind-slaughter." If it be desired to promote a good 
appetite, whether of mind or body, it is not to be done by 
confinement and gorging, which soon destroy it utterly; the 
body must be taken into the play-grounds of nature, and 



TRUE IDEA OF EDUCATIOIS^. 285 

the mind be inspired tkrough. the imagination, upon which 
curiosity itself dej)ends. A child's imagination can hardly 
be too much encouraged, provided always that it be guided 
to some resting-place, where it can repose awhile, and in due 
time, onwards again, but always with an interval. To ex- 
cite a child's imagination, sets all its best feelings in motion ; 
mere facts are as useless to it as they are dreary; they die 
upon a child's heart like rotten leaves.* Education, in the 
popular acceptation of the word, might often be dispensed 
with to advantage if Inspiration could be communicated in 
place of it. To that genial stimulus of the best energies of 
the soul into work on their own behalf, which it is the mark 
and proud office of a great nature unconsciously to commu- 
nicate — that stimu-lus of which all who have stood in the 
presence of such natures, have been rapturously sensible ; 
and which they look back upon as the Aurora of their 
spu'itual day — to that alone should the sacred name of 
Education be applied. It was his power of inspiring that 
gave such wonderful success to the late truly eminent Pro- 
fessor Stuart, of Andover. Many a man of celebrity has 
been heard to say — " I first learned to think under the in- 
spiration of Mr. Stuart ; he first taught me how to use my 
mind ; his first words were an epoch in my history." Stuart 
proved more perhaps than any other man has ever done, 
that the excellence of a teacher does not consist in lodging 
his own ideas safely in the remembrance of his pupils, but 
in arousing their individual powers to independent action, 
in giving them vitality, hope, fervor, courage, in dispelling 
their drowsiness, and spurring them onward to self-improve- 



* See tlie excellent remarks on this subject in Harriet Martineau's 
Home Education, chapter xxii. ,• also the article " Civilization" in 
Blackwood for January, 1855, p. 26 and onwards. 



286 AIM OP THE TRUE TEACHER. 

ment.* It is to such men and their influence that Plato 
alkides so eloquently; "Inspired by the Muses, they com- 
municate the sacred fire to others, who again pass it on to 
other minds, and so form whole circles of divine enthusiasts." 
Longinus also, in that beautiful passage where he speaks of 
those who, though of themselves they little feel the power 
of Phoebus, " swell with the inspiring force of those great 
and exalted spirits."f The notion that we must be taught 
everything is false and destructive. It is better to be taught 
very little, provided that a noble curiosity be excited, and 
then the object of education is virtually accomplished. The 
most extended course of teaching, conducted by the best- 
informed masters, often fails to take the anticipated effect ; 
it is by that which we acquire for ourselves that we are 
really elevated, and it is that alone which lifts us above 
other men. What the world calls " great men" owe their 
nobility mainly to their self-culture. Great minds, more- 
over, it will almost always be found, are such as have had 
this invaluable sentiment of curiosity early awakened and 
judiciously fostered. The avowed principle of education 
with the mother and first intellectual guide of Sir William 
Jones was to " excite his curiosity." With curiosity for its 
dominant force, the mind becomes open and prepared for 
everything; and although on many points it may long 
remain uninformed, it is capable, at a moment's notice, of 
receiving information. It is the inquiring boy who usually 
becomes the philosophic man, and the philosopher thus en- 
gendered who is most likely to " ripen into the priest," the 
highest (and seldomest) development of human nature. 



* See the memoir of this eminent man in Kitto's Journal of 
Sacred Literature for January, 1853, to which we are indebted for 
the above. 

f Compare Coningsby, Book 3d, chapter 2d. 



KNOWLEDGE MUST BE ASSIMILATED. 287 

What the Boy admires, 
The Youth endeavors, and the Man acquires. 

The incurious man, on the other hand, not thus receptive, 
and from his very incuriousness, never becomes great. 

171. Appetite, after all, must not be mistaken for Acqui- 
sition. It is not much reading that builds up wisdom and 
life; a man may injure himself and cancel his true life by 
careless or ill-timed reading, as readily as he may hurt his 
body by unseasonable eating and unwholesome foods. It is 
through not properly discriminating between these two 
courses and their results, that with many persons there is a 
kind of suspicion and distrust of the value of learning. But 
that culture, whether of body or soul, is alone injurious, 
which has no regard to time, and means, and measure. 
" Desultory reading is indeed very mischievous, by fostering 
habits of loose, discontinuous thought, and by relaxing the 
power of attention, which of all our faculties needs most 
care, and is most improved by it. On the other hand, a 
well-regulated course of study will no more weaken the mind 
than hard exercise will weaken the body ; nor will a strong 
understanding be weighed down by its knowledge, any more 
than an oak is by its leaves, or than Samson was by his 
locks. He whose sinews are drained by his hair, must 
already be a weakling."* What we have to do, in order to 
be healthy and strong, is not merely to eat, but to assimilate 
what we eat. To read merely for reading's sake is almost 
as unprofitable as not reading at all. Setting out, in the 
first place, with a clear idea of what we wish to learn, which 
is eminently important, we must afterwards, if we would 
realize what we have read, reperuse it in thought, This 
only makes it truly our own. Better stUl is it to write down 



* Guesses at Truth. 1, 212. 



288 PHILOSOPHY OF READING. 

the central ideas, or seek to communicate them in conversa- 
tion. "All knowledge," says Whipple, "however imposing 
in appearance, is but superficial knowledge, if it be merely 
the mind's furniture, and not the mind's nutriment. It 
must be transmuted into mind, as food into blood, in order 
to become wisdom and power. Many of the generals op- 
posed to Napoleon understood military science as well as he 
did, but he beat them on every occasion where victory de- 
pended on a wise movement made at a moment's thought, 
because science had been transfused into his mind, while to 
theirs it was only attached."^ It does not follow, because 
we seem to ourselves to possess things, that we veritably pos- 
sess them. Though a man may have collected a thousand 
facts in the ologies and the graphys, he may yet not possess 
one of them in reality; though he cover himself with fea- 
thers, it needs something else that he may fly ; it is of no use 
merely to see what is true, unless by assimilating it, we prove 
its efficacy, and feel it exerting upon us some salutary effect. 
Accordingly, it is not so much the reading of books, and the 
manual part of science, and the promenade part of visits to 
the fields and the sea-side, from which we are to expect spi- 
ritual aliment; we are nourished only as these things are 
incorporated into our inmost thought. Many, especially 
young persons, make it a matter of pride that they are 
"great readers." They literally devour books, yet what 
good does it do them? Life, real, enjoyable life, is im- 
mensely dependent on intellectual and reading habits, but 
it never comes of mere gormandizing. "We read to live, 
not live to read." Mere consumers of books not only derive 
no true nourishment from what they read, but are total 
strangers to the higher pleasures of literary taste. Like the 



* " On Intellectual Health and Disease," in a clever set of Essays 
on Literature and Life. (American.) 



HOW TO READ WITH MOST PROFIT. 289 

lower animals, they feed only, they do not eat. To eat, in 
the true idea of the act, requires a far more scientific use of 
the mouth than is the case with mere feeding. Epicurism 
is no mere invention of low sensuality; they who practice it 
do but carry to an unworthy extreme one of the most excel- 
lent and characteristic powers of human nature. No man 
is wise who is not an epicure withm the legitimate limits ; 
none are more foolish and unkind to themselves than those 
who regard only quantity and speed. So with the mental 
palate. If we be not deliberate ejDicures in our reading, 
half our advantages and privileges are thrown away, and 
we are only like quadrupeds unintelligently munching grass. 
Not that we ought to pick out Apician morsels. We are 
not to read books merely with a view to passages which 
have reference to ourselves, or for the sake of the more 
splendid ones, or of such as may support favorite theories. 
This is to refuse the greater part of their worth, often not to 
discover it at all, and is the secret of many books being 
thrown aside as dull and tiresome. Often when a man says 
he "sees nothing" in a given book, the fact of the matter is 
simply that he does not see himself in it, which, as a clever 
writer remarks, " if it be not a comedy or a satire, is likely 
enough." No book should ever be read except with two 
distinct aims, first, our own improvement; second, the just 
apprehension of the author, whom we have never proj)erly 
read, and therefore not benefited by, till we have seen his 
subject as he saw it, whether right or wrong. To this end 
we must possess ourselves of all the spirit that lies beneath 
the words, mastering that internal character, sense and de- 
sign of the work, to which our regard from the first moment 
should be directed. Hence too the value as well as pleas- 
antness of two persons reading together. Each perceives 
different beauties, and in each is awakened a train of differ- 
ently-associated ideas, throwing light from opposite sides 

25 N 



290 SELECTION OF BOOKS. 

upon the arguments and illustrations, so that the author is 
more thoroughly understood, and as a consequence, more 
truly enjoyed. Especially should husband and wife asso- 
ciate in their reading, he profiting by her feminine or afFec- 
tional insight, she by his logical intelligence. 

172. Many read less than they would perhaps, from the 
seeming difficulty in the selection of books. How are we to 
judge, they say, what books will, and what will not repay 
perusal? To tell a good book is not really perplexing, any 
more than to distinguish a wholesome food. A good book, 
like a great nature, opens out a fine foreground, wherever 
we may open it, and like the breath of a summer's morning, 
invites us onward. It may be known by the number of 
fragmentary, aphoristic sayings which may be gleaned from 
it, full of grace and pleasing truth, as flowers on that summer 
morning's walk. Bacon and Shakspere have multitudes of 
such sayings. The Bible has more than all other books to- 
gether. Books that soon perish, die because void of them. 
They make the difierence between books of ideas, and books 
of new words. The value of a book consists not in what it 
will do for our amusement, but in what it will communicate. 
Whether dealing with fancy or with fact, all books in their 
kind are dictionaries, and those are the best which yield 
most material for reflection. It is not fine writing, as many 
suppose, that makes fine books. Books are fine only in so 
far as they flow from sound and abundant knowledge, a 
picturesque and unobtrusive presentation of which is their 
infallible characteristic. It is given, moreover, compactly. 
When an author of any pretensions is found abridging 
everything, the simple fact of the matter is that he perceives 
everything. Diffusiveness is always a sign either of poverty 
or pride ; nothing of his, the vain man thinks, can ever be 
too much. Good books, again, may be known by their 
rarely containing anything unintelligible to earnest reading, 



CHARACTERISTICS OP GOOD BOOKS. 291 

whatever hardness may appear upon the surface. We should 
always be glad to find a book invite us further and deeper 
than we have previously gone ; for if it do not, it will only 
leave us where we were. Those writers who never go further 
into a subject than we can readily accompany them, or 
than is compatible with making what they say indisputably 
clear to man, woman, and child, may gratify us, indeed; — 
by awakening and enlivening our recollections, they may 
even benefit us ; — but they do nothing whatever to increase 
the vigor of our intellect, for how can we gather strength 
except by exercise? They may, by virtue of popularity of 
theme, be the lights of their own age; but they certainly 
will not be the lights of succeeding ages; nor though they 
may please for the hour, can we permanently entertain a 
high opinion of them, any more than we esteem a river deep 
when we find that we can readily see the bottom. On the 
other hand, we should never allow ourselves to be dismayed 
by seeming hardness, remembering rather that the author 
has only half the work to do, the reader a duty on his own 
side; that to apply ourselves closely, in fact, is the way to 
get the mental strength we find ourselves deficient in. The 
best writer, it has been said, is he who merely states his pre- 
mises, and leaves his readers to work out the conclusions for 
themselves. Still may we be sure that men who are really 
competent to teach, always so teach that attention may un- 
derstand. The truly instructive mind, when it plays forth 
the beautiful abundance of its wisdom, always condescends 
to be intelligible. The lessons of true intelligence are like 
the rays of the morning sun ; the light and magnitude are 
revealed, but the splendor is reserved, pleasing the more, by 
dazzling the less. No author can be expected to do all. 
" Learn to observe" is as needful a maxim in reading as in 
natural history. It was remarked by the celebrated Haller, 
that while yawning we are deaf; the same act of drowsiness 



292 BOOKS THAT SHOULD BE AVOIDED. 

that stretches open our mouths, shuts up our ears. It is 
much the same in the exercises of the understanding; a lazy 
half-attention is in effect a mental yawn. "Where a subject 
that demands thought, has been thoughtfully treated, we 
must be willing to make similar efforts on our own part, and 
think with the author, or in vain will the author have 
thought for us." Another excellent test of a good book is 
that the opinions of its author do not range with those of 
any recognized party. It will not readily fall in with any 
particular creed in theology or school ia philosophy; libra- 
rians do not know what to do with it ; and sectarians become 
angry and abusive. Freedom from sectarian bias by no 
means implies freedom from religion. So far from this, 
every great and good book, whatever may be its subject, dis- 
closes from beginning to end, a devout and intelligent sub- 
mission to revealed truth. Books that give no recognition 
to religion are stones rather than bread. Here we see our 
way towards learning what to avoid, — a difficulty almost as 
great as that of choice. One golden rule will almost include 
the whole, namely. Avoid all that class of literature which 
has a knowing tone. "Every truly good book, or piece of 
book, is full of admiration and awe; it may contain firm 
assertions or stern satire, but it never sneers coldly, nor as- 
serts haughtily, and it always leads you to i-everence and 
love something with your whole heart." What constitutes 
an "improper" book, depends chiefly on the intelligence and 
purity of the reader. To charge unfitness upon a book, 
unless it be in palpable antagonism with Scripture and good 
manners, is often only to show that the plane of thought is 
low and contracted. Detractors and small critics would do 
well to remember that many kinds of errors are only possi- 
ble to great souls, and that the very circumstances which in 
their weak vision render a Avork " unfit," may certify a most 
royal nature and descent. The assistance in choice of books 



LITERAKY CRITICISM. 293 

furnished by Critics and Reviewers, upon the whole is un- 
trustworthy. They may have intellect enough to criticize, 
but the preeminent quality needed to their vocation is 
Christian love to the neighbor. The primary office of a 
critic is not, as many seem to think, to detect imperfections. 
That is a very shallow mind which seeks to distinguish itself 
by facility in finding errors, trying to make clever people 
appear stupid. "The first duty of the critic is to create 
happiness where it may be done faithfully, and to shrink 
from giving pain where it can honestly be avoided." Stead- 
fastly to adhere to this, the highest principle of criticism, 
requires, however, too ■ noble a nature to be met with fre- 
quently. "A true critic," says Addison, "ought to dwell 
upon excellences rather than defects; to discover the con- 
cealed beauties of a writer; and communicate to the world 
such things as are worth its observation." The rule applies 
universally. Rightly to comprehend and estimate things, 
whether in Art, literature or nature, we must train ourselves 
to admiration of Excellence. The contrary course serves 
only to blind and darken. He who does not strive to rise 
above nature, will sink below it. Finally, let our favorite 
subject of study be what it may, we should above all things 
take care not to restrict our reading too much to particular 
themes or particular authors. "Preserve proportion in your 
reading," says Dr. Arnold. "Keep your view of men and 
things extensive, and depend upon it, a mixed knowledge is 
not a superficial one. As far as it goes, the views it su2)plies 
are true; whereas he who reads in one class of writers only, 
contracts views which are almost sure to be perverted, and 
which are not only narrow, but false," 

173. Solicitude for food, or hunger, and the appeasing it 
legitimately and discreetly, are thus the inseparable signs 
and attestations of health and vigor in the life of the spirit 
as well as in that of the body. Where there is no desire for 

25® 



294 SIGNS OF A HEALTHY MENTAL APPETITE. 

food there is no true enjoyment, and he is the happiest man 
who feels how closely he relies both upon physical food and 
spiritual food. A constant question in our self-examination 
should be, what is the disposition of our minds, including 
both the intellectual and the aifectional faculties, towards 
nature, and towards literature, and preeminently, towards 
the word of God — in a word, what is our appetite for the 
" feast of reason ?" No man can ever say to himself 
" enough." As the meals we made in our youth avail no- 
thing to the renewal of our bodies of to-day, so, if we would 
live spiritually, we must perpetually feed the soul. Irre- 
spectively of new truths, how much of what we acquired in 
years gone by, imperceptibly slides away, and needs to be 
reclaimed ! " The ideas, like the children of our youth," as 
Locke beautifully observes, " often die before us, and our 
minds not seldom represent those tombs to which we are ap- 
proaching, where, though the brass and marble remain, the 
inscriptions are effaced, and the imagery mouldered away. 
The pictures in our minds are drawing in fading colors, and 
if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear." Hence 
the importance of surrounding ourselves with what is beau- 
tiful, as far as lies in our power, so as to keep those ideas as 
much as possible from decay. Hazlitt has said somewhere 
of the portrait of a beautiful female, with a noble counte- 
nance, that it seems as if an unhandsome action would be 
impossible in its presence. Most men of any refinement 
must have felt the truth and force of this sentiment; it 
helps us to understand the importance of having beautiful 
pictures, statues, models, and other works of art, round 
about us in our daily sitting-rooms, so that correspondent 
ideas may be continually excited, ideas of opposite nature 
repulsed, and old thoughts kept alive. As famishing men 
feed upon what is nearest, so does the hungry soul upon 
what is close at hand, thus possibly upon evil things, if we 



BOOKS AND EXTERNAL NATURE. 295 

omit to encircle it with good. Hence, too, we may see the 
importance of keeping our books within sight, instead of in 
a book-case upstairs. 

174. After the correspondence of physical feeding with 
intellectual feeding, as regards the general principle, it is 
interesting to note how close is that which subsists between 
the two principal species of spiritual food, or books and ob- 
jective nature. As there is a " book of nature," so in a 
good library are there "waving woods and pastures ever 
new." Books, regarded in their highest and truest light, 
are as much a part of nature as gardens. Gardens indeed 
they are. We do not quit nature when from walking in 
the fields we step into our study; we only enter into another 
presence of nature. We must not suppose that because in 
dictionaries nature is the contrary to art, there is nature 
only where art has not been superadded. As in winter, 
though the forests be bare and the birds mute, the delights 
of the true lover of the country are nevertheless not decidu- 
ous till the spring ; so where there is solid affection for truth 
and loveliness, no place is empty of nature, but simply filled 
after another manner. The only difference a soul so ani- 
mated is conscious of, is that while summer is more pecu- 
liarly the time to feel, and winter to think, the fields and 
the library are their happiest arenas respectively. Books 
teach us to understand nature ; nature, in turn, teaches us 
how to understand books. So animated, going into rural 
paths is reading. When Goethe's exemplar, Kleist, was 
asked why so fond of lonely country walks, " I go," said he, 
" hunting for images." Similarly, when we tread our " duke- 
dom large enough," we find in its immortal voices that be- 
nign, medicinal tranquility, without which. Life is a thing 
we hear of, but never truly feel. For, as said before, we be- 
come conscious of Life in the degree that our minds, though 
at work, are in repose — not unemployed, but at ease and 



296 THE FRIENDSHIP OF BOOKS. 

peacefiil. Work and repose are not antagonistic ; they are 
each other's complement. The grandest workings of nature 
are precisely those which present to us, along with move- 
ment, the sublimest pictures of tranquility, as the roll of the 
sea, the circling of the constellations round the pole. Great 
workers, or those who most largely realize life, are always 
at rest. They accomplish so much because they have 
learned the secret of tranquility. Free from those conten- 
tions of spirit which most men allow to distract them from 
the true ends and prerogatives of life, the tranquil find the 
time and the opportunity which the mass of mankind so 
loudly complain that they have not. Like the calm-flowing 
river, they reflect every tree and cloud, while the brawling 
and troubled stream shows not a single picture. It is the 
tranquil who truly " inherit the earth." 

175. Good books, like nature, at once alleviate care, re- 
press the insurgency of evil passions, and encourage and 
animate the amiable. "When I come into my library," 
said Heinsius, " in the very laj) of eternity, amidst so many 
divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and such 
sweet content, that I j)ity all those great and rich who know 
not this happiness." " These friends of mine," writes Pe- 
trarch, " regard the pleasures of the world as the supreme 
good. They are ignorant of my resources. I have friends, 
whose society is delightful to me ; persons of all countries 
and all ages, distinguished in war, in council, and in letters. 
Easy to live with, always at my command, they come at 
my call, and return when I desire them ; they are never out 
of humor, and they answer all my questions with readiness. 
Some present before me, in review, the events of past ages ; 
others reveal to me the secrets of nature ; these teach me 
how to live, and those how to die ; these dispel mj melan- 
choly by their mirth, and amuse me by their sallies of wit, 
and some there are who prepare my soul to suffer everything. 



FINE OLD BOYS. 297 

to desire nothing, and to become thoroughly acquainted with 
itself. As a reward of such services, they require only a 
corner of my little house, where they may be safely shel- 
tered from the depredations of their enemies." But to enjoy 
such friends, which is to enjoy literature, we must, as in 
order to love nature permanently, begin early. He who 
would long remain a man, must early begin to be one. 
Whatever affluence of intellect we may enjoy in riper life, 
we owe not so much to the acquisitions purely of manhood, 
as to the successively renewed and re-invigorated impressions 
of boyhood. Growing up with such dispositions, old age 
itself lives in serene enthusiasm, and like the old man in 
Chaucer, who had nothing hoar about him but his locks, is 
adolescent to the last. 

Though I be hoar, I fare as doth a tree 
That blosmeth ere the fruit y-woxen be ; 
The blosmy tree is neither drie ne ded ; 
T feel me nowhere hoar but on my hed ; 
Mine harte and all my limmes ben as green 
As laurel through the year is for to seen. 

To carry, as somewhere remarked by Coleridge, the feelings 
of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the 
child's sense of wonder and novelty with sights and experi- 
ences which every day for perhaps half a century has ren- 
dered familiar — and to which achievement wise mental 
culture alone is needful — is assuredly, after virtue, the 
greatest triumph of life. We often hear of fine hoys. The 
finest of all boys is the fine old boy, he who has obeyed the 
poet's great command, Keep true to the dream of your 
youth. 

N* 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THJE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT OF LIFE. 

176. While the axiom that "Life is Love" verifies itself 
in the manner set forth, there is involved in it another and 
yet higher truth. Love is a word of many difierent senses. 
Lowest is the physical : the middle one is that wherein it 
denotes the ruling desire of a man, the disposition of the will 
which is predominant with him, and which may or may not 
be in concord with the intellect : highest is the sense wherein 
it denotes the energy, in a happy and beautiful direction, of 
the entire spiritual nature, or the intellect and affections com- 
bined. (See page 259.) This last thus applies to and denotes 
the religious state of the soul, which is the blossoming of our 
humanity, and of which Love is the essential characteristic. 
The development and marriage of the intellect and affections 
is at once the great duty and the blessedness of our being, 
and thus our highest Life. The perfection of human nature 
is when these two are conjoined, as man and wife, in even 
and lovely flow. As a happy marriage is the most perfect 
and beautiful state of existence that can be attained, as 
regards the social relations of mankind ; so the most perfect 
and beautiful state of the soul is when the affections delight 
in what the intellect says is right and true; and when the 
intellect (always referring itself to the Word of God as the 
standard), commends what the heart inclines to. To be so 
disposed towards each other, is to live in conjugal amity, 

298 



THE TRUE HUMAN LIFE. 299 

which is pure and unchangeable Love, and thus true and 
perfect Life, Such a state of things is not only the perfection 
of human nature ; it is the only one proper to be designated 
human nature, and only where it is present is man in his 
natural state. All lower conditions are ^mnatural. It is 
important to observe this, because people are apt to call the 
life of savages the natural state of man ; a mode of speaking, 
unless merely intended to signify ignorance of the arts, 
utterly inconsistent with all reason and analogy. No one 
would say that a tree was in its natural state when, through 
adverse circumstances, it was stunted and barren. Nature 
is Excellence ; anything that is not excellent is want of, or 
departure from nature. The natural state of the tree is 
when it is appareled in all the luxuriance of leaf and opu- 
lence of fruit which it is capable of; and the natural state 
of man is when the intellect and affections unite before the 
altar of the law of God, which is to engage in pure and 
faithful love. If either of these great spiritual powers un- 
duly predominate, error, and therefore unhappiness, neces- 
sarily ensues. Apart from the tendency there may arise 
towards moral wrong, if the heart hold too great power, in- 
stead of religion there is fanaticism ; if the head be too mas- 
terftil, there is rationalism. Regarded as a being adapted 
for society, man, it may be added, is in a much more " natu- 
ral" state when he is living civilized in a town than Avhen 
ignorantly vegetating in the wilderness. The nearest ap- 
proach to genuine natural life is in reality that which we 
mistakenly call "artificial" life. 

177. Religion is the feeling and exercise of such love, and 
the primary purpose of all true religious culture is to induce, 
or rather to renew it ; for the spiritual declension which was 
the loss of Eden was no other than the estrangement of the 
affections from their affianced partner, and until these be- 
come reconciled, the heavenly garden cannot be re-entered. 



800 FAITH AND WORKS. 

The end of religious culture is threefold; namely, to recon- 
cile man to God, to reconcile him to nature, to reconcile him 
to hiviself. The first is the final and crowning object, but 
the last is its indispensable ground-work. The practical 
beginning must always be made in man's own bosom, and 
the sign and certificate of the truthfulness and efficacy of a 
given system of religious culture, is the degree in which this 
lovely harmony is reestablished. There is no religion which 
can be referred exclusively to the heart, and none which 
comes solely from the head. There is none which is only 
Path, and none which is only Works. However grand and 
profound the perceptions of the understanding, if the heart 
be indisposed to carry them out, still there is no religion. 
Neither is there any if the intellect have nothing to proffer 
to the affections, or only what is unworthy. For in the one 
case, instead of love, there is variance; and in the other, 
though there is a bride, there is no husband; or if the ideas 
be selfish and sensual, a husband with whom true love can- 
not grow up. Man cannot be virtuous in his heart, if he 
do not know in his head what virtue is; we cannot love that 
which we are ignorant of This takes us to another great 
truth; namely, that as there is no virtue unconnected with 
God, or underived from him, or intelligible except by refer- 
ence to him, a right intellectual conception of God is the 
very foundation of true religion, and thence of all genuine 
life. How grateful should we be that no conception is more 
readily accessible! We have but to think of the examples 
set by Him " in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead, 
bodily." Striving to imitate these examples, makes the 
diflTerence between religion rightly so called, and mere men- 
tal acquiescence in a particular scheme of religious doctrine. 
Religion is to live a doctrine, not simply to believe in one; 
and the best doctrine a man can live is the life of Christ. 
He who most practises this, is the most truly religious. It 



THEORY AND PRACTICE. 301 

does not follow that defective knowledge of God, or a wrong 
intellectual conception of him, is a man's destruction. Men 
are not saved or lost by what they think, but by what they 
do. The essence of religion is a God-fearing and devotional 
spirit, and no man is rejected who acts faithfully and sin- 
cerely up to that which he has been taught to believe true. 
He who can pray, honestly and silently, and feel his prayers 
answered, is no stranger to the heavenly fold, however im- 
perfect and erroneous may be his ideas. The peculiar cha- 
racteristic of the intelligent religious man is, that he is 
continually aspiring after a larger knowledge of his God. A 
true Christian is never satisfied until he knows his Maker 
and Saviour more accurately than any object of his senses. 
Unpossessed of religious life, man only half lives. No mat- 
ter what intelligence, and learning, and love of nature there 
may be, no matter what health of body, what aptitude for 
pleasures of sense, what money and opportunity wherewith 
to procure them; wanting the true, high life of the soul, 
existence is but sapless and inanimate, and all things no 
more than what the poet calls the imaginary wife of the 
bachelor, (po-/^f)b\j TiapayyAXcona, "a cold armful."* With 
it, science, literature, love of nature, as we have seen, make 
our experience long and beautiful, but there are hours when 
all are vanity, and wretched is he who then has no higher 
solace to take refuge in. Looking on how much some men 
possess — some in the material world, some in the intellectual 
— we are often inclined to envy them. Could we look into 
their hearts, and see how little of their property they e7ijoy, 
for want of this life, when the sorrows of our mortal pil- 
grimage come thick and heavy, we should be more disposed 
to pity them. All wisdom and philosophy resolve into this 
one simple principle, that the happiness of intelligent crea- 



* Lycophron. Cassandra, 113. 
2G 



302 TRUE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS SECTS. 

tures depends upon the development of their moral and 
religious nature. 

178. These two classes of the religious, namely, those with 
whom Life or Love is uppermost, and those with whom 
Belief, are the only real sects or parties of the religious 
world. Other diiferences are but superficial and temporal. 
Every church and denomination has its proportion of them ; 
every man is either an amo or a credo, and society sufiers or 
prospers according as the credos or the amos hold most 
power. In the amos chiefly originate measures of social 
reform and improvement. From the credos come most part 
of the discouragements and obstructions which they meet 
with ; for the credos think that their creed is the incarnation 
and consolidation of all possible truth, and that " reforms" 
are only disguised attacks upon it. Hence they are prone 
also to condemn all rival corporations of credos, and to work 
diligently at procuring proselytes to their own. The avios, 
on the other hand, as they make religion to consist in good- 
ness and love, care little to quarrel about dogmas ; they try 
rather to promote peace and happiness. They believe, 
nevertheless, and quite as reverently and firmly as the credos 
do ; the difference is that the amos use their belief as a 
means, while the credos stand still in it as a finality. The 
credos, in like manner, also love, but for the most part their 
affection is all " given to heaven," wherein they find excuse 
for loving nobody on earth. Church and chapel they visit 
punctually, but the fatherless and the widow they care little 
to interfere with : these come to the province of the amos. 
Hence, until we know pretty certainly whether a man is an 
amo or a credo, in regard to the sect he is identified with, 
the mere name of his sect supplies not the least clue to his 
religious quality. Unitarians are just as likely to be a7nos 
as High Churchmen who fight duels, live luxuriously and 
wantonly, and heap up treasures, not for heaven. Quite as 



WORLDLY PLEASURES AND RELIGION. 303 

likely to be merely credos are those who rant and stamp, 
and have spiritual hysterics, proclaiming their conversion, 
and its day and hour, as if that could be effected in a mo- 
ment which is coextensive and concurrent with one's whole 
life. From the mere holding of a doctrine, in short, little 
can be predicated, nor are the names of the doctrines them- 
selves truly descriptive. " Tell me a man's creed and I 
know where to look for him, but I have still to inquire what 
are his morals. Tell me, on the other hand, that he is a 
man of justice, charity, and love, and I have no occasion to 
ask whether he be religious." The credo, as to his mental 
character, is well described by Morris. " It is possible," he 
says, " to be delighted with a doctrine, and yet have no just 
conception of its practical bearings; to revel in the thought 
of a blessing, and yet not discern its force as a moral mo- 
tive; to have an intense admiration of the principles of 
equity and love, and yet be a stranger to both the theory 
and the practice of them in the varied relations of life and 
the world." (Religion and Business, p. 6.) The highest 
idea of the religious man is plainly that which is sought 
after by the amos. A true reverence of divine sanctities 
proves itself by an equal reverence of human sanctities. 

179. Men often suppose, that to rise into the religious 
life, it is necessary that they shall withdraw from intercourse 
with the world of secular things. Not so. It is realized 
better in society than in the hermitage; and the world, in- 
stead of being closed as a scene of pleasure, acquires new 
interest and value; it manifests power even to amend us. 
"Use the world," is the doctrine of purity. To forsake it, 
is ungrateful to God and prejudicial to our best interests. 
The truly religious man cannot see how it is a proof of 
piety to emasculate his natural instincts. He knows how to 
be both "merry and wise," and that it is religious to be so. 
Those who make destruction of the common affections of our 



304 WORLDLY PLEASURES AND RELIGION. 

nature the condition of rising to God, confound use with 
abuse, will with wilftilness. The value and importance of 
the sensuous life are such as it is almost impossible to over- 
rate. The evil consists in staying in it, or rather in neglect- 
ing to engraft upon it a higher life. There is nothing in the 
spirit of religion hostile to cheerful enjoyment of the world. 
Dissipation and unlawful pleasures unquestionably it pro- 
hibits, and also that unlawful degree of attachment to plea- 
sures in themselves pure and innocent which withdraws the 
attention from the fulfillment of duty. But it never seeks to 
forbid pleasure, or to demand the renunciation of anything 
that it is of real advantage to us to possess, however intensely 
secular. Pleasure in every form, is good in itself. It is the 
sweet allurement with which God, the all-wise, and the all- 
good, surrounds useful things and needful acts, in order that 
we may seek and perform them. It is not pleasure which 
corrupts men, but men who corrupt pleasure; rightly re- 
garded, it leads men, not away from God and religion, but 
toivards them; resembling, in this respect, the sun and stars, 
which never tempted and diverted men to that idolatry we 
read of, but began to be worshiped only when they were 
idolaters already. In becoming religious, in fact, so far 
from losing anything, we gain, and often where least ex- 
pected. Nature, art, science, poetry, music, shape a very 
different experience to the religious and to the non-religious. 
No man can perceive their more excellent beauties unless 
he give his heart to what is beautiful morally. As light and 
heat come together in the sunbeam, so, as a law, do elevated 
intellectual perceptions connect themselves with virtue of 
desire and deed. Ubi charitas, ibi elaritas. "Blessed are 
the pure in heart, for they shall see God," is a promise ap- 
plying to this world no less than to the next; for to "see" 
God, is to be sensible of His immediate presence, and this 
depends on no outward change, no shifting in time and 



RELIGION THE GREAT ILLUMINATOR. 305 

place, but on adaptation of one's heart. So with the glorious 
promise of the new heaven and the new earth. Whatever 
kind of cosmological fulfillment it may be intended to have, 
and whatever deep, spiritual meanings may be enclosed in 
it, it is a promise realized by every man who looks forth 
upon the universe Avith the eyes and heart of religion. 
When in the 65th chapter of Isaiah, our Lord says in refer- 
ence to his advent to those who seek him, — "I create new 
heavens and a new earth," he means, as the event proves, 
not that he literally reconstructs the world and sky, but 
that by filling the soul with his divine love, it sees every- 
thing after a more admirable manner. If, therefore, a man 
would read creation in its fiillness, — if he would thoroughly 
appreciate what nature and art have to ofier, his best prepa- 
ration is observance of the precepts of faith to God and 
charity to the neighbor. "To know nature, thou must be 
true to nature. To be true to nature, thou must live look- 
ing forever to the mighty Spirit who presides."* Nature 
has been well said to have an exhaustless meaning ; but it is 
a meaning to be rightly seen and heard only by him who 
strives, ceaselessly and prayerfully, to become all that the 
Divine image and likeness is capable of becoming, which is, 
in fact, to become human and religious. Human nature is 
like a microscope; every step in its regeneration is an addi- 
tional lens, enabling us to see more beautiftilly and pro- 
foundly. "As we become more truly human," says an ami- 
able writer, "the world becomes to us more truly divine. 
Light from heaven must beam upon the world within, be- 
fore the outward works of God will appear in the perfection 
of beauty. It is only when reason has acquired motive to 
look beyond outward sight, and is enabled to dwell on a 
brighter futurity, that the present world becomes frilly sig- 



* Panthea, or the Spirit of Nature, by Eobert Hunt, p. 24. 
26* 



306 BEAUTY OF VIRTUE. 

nificant."* Religion is the green mountain-slope whicli 
commands the incomparable view. Blessed are they who 
find it. As the light we admire on the discs of the moon 
and planets is not their own, but the sun's, so the beauty of 
outward nature is from heaven through humanity. Form 
can only be duly estimated when we are capable of sympa- 
thizing with the spirit : no man can go further than his own 
measure; the small and weak therefore no further than the 
small and weak : only from the height of our own nature 
can we see the height of others' nature, or of the world's; 
some men see no beauty in the Venus. To be a physiogno- 
mist therefore, in regard either to the face of nature or the 
face of man, needs first that we be great-souled ; else we can- 
not possibly compass the greatness of that we contemplate. 
No bad, conceited, or afiected man can ever be a physiogno- 
mist; Nature and the soul are things altogether beyond his 
grasp. The whole matter is contained in the ancient canon 
that every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit 
which set it forth ; — a canon so essentially fundamental in 
philosophy, that every fresh acknowledgment seems an un- 
conscious echo of those before. "In order," says Plotinus, 
" to direct the view aright, it behooves that the beholder shall 
make himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. 
Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own es- 
sence been soliform (i. e. pre-configured to light by a similarity 
of essence with that of light) ; neither can a soul not beauti- 
ful attain to an understanding of beauty."t What but an 
expansion of this, is that delicious little book. The Ministry 
of the Beautiful?! "The thickest night cannot veil the 



* The use of the Body in relation to the Mind, by Dr. Moore, 
p. 162. 

t Ennead 1, Book 6, "Of the Beautiful." (Page 57, F G. Ed. 
Ficini.) 

X By H. J. Slack. 1852. 



A PUKE HEART THE DISCERNER OF BEAUTY. 307 

beauty and mystery of nature one-tenth part so effectually 
as a low moral state. Divinest forms in vain present them- 
selves to eyes whose mechanism communicates with no re- 
cipient soul. Beauty without is the reflection of love and 
obedience within. To the true worshiper nature exhibits 
beauty and sublimity, where to the irreverent is barrenness 
and vacuity. Two men may live on the same spot, one 
dwelling in an Eden garden, sparkling with fountains, 
odorous with the loveliest flowers, full of celestial sounds, 
while the other is in a desert, the abode of uncleanness and 
desolation. In proportion as a man developes beauty within, 
does he find it without." Emerson follows in words of 
gold: — "The problem," says he, "of restoring to the world 
original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of 
the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see in nature is in 
our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the 
axis of things, and so they appear not transparent, but 
opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity is, that man 
is disunited himself. A life in harmony with nature, the 
love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understand 
her text, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and 
every form significant of its hidden life and final cause." 
Thus eloquently and variedly is it testified that in the degree 
that we become sensible of the charms of virtue, our hearts 
open to the true seeing of those that are physical; in other 
words, that a man's opinion of the world is always in pro- 
portion to his own comeliness. All who do see the world 
from such a stand-point are Poets. To become virtuous 
is to open the eyes to poetic sights ; and conversely, before a 
man can be a poet, or at all events, a true and great poet, 
he must have a loving and religious heart.* An immoral 



* Almost a truism, from the variety of authors in which tliis 
idea may be found expressed ; its earliest occurrence appears to be in 



308 RELIGIOUS LIFE AND SECULAR LIFE. 

genius is no genius, simply a man of talent. Such, an one 
was Lord Byron. Shakspere, on the other hand, was of 
the highest moral purity, therefore capable of all the func- 
tions and rewards of poetry in the completest signification 
of the word. " The profundity and simplicity of his poeti- 
cal view of life," as Ulrici finely remarks, "was simply on 
this account sublime and profound, because it was Christian, 
and Christian also, even because it was sublime and pro- 
found."* Not that Poetry and Eeligion are in any way 
synonymous or convertible. Delighting "to sit under the 
boughs of poetry, and to be washed by the surging waves 
of music," religion still carefully distinguishes itself from 
them. The one implies faith in a Saviour, the other simply 
love for a Creator. 

180. To realize these things, it is not necessary that a man 
should be always thinking about what is spi^ritual and reli- 
gious, any more than that he should quit the world of sen- 
suous enjoyment. Doing so, he could not properly address 
himself to the details of his secular duties ; but he should 
always have his mind governed by what is religious. Reli- 
gion does not consist in forever busying one's self with reli- 
gious ideas, in season and out of season ; but in letting our 
knowledge of what is right, color and ensoul whatever we 
do. Unhappily, in many minds, it has been made to con- 
sist too much in the performance of certain ceremonies, 
acknowledging God at stated hours, speaking on given sub- 
jects in a certain way ; to be, in a word, not what in its 



Strabo, about the middle of his first book. (P. 17, Ed. Cassaubon, 
1620.) 

* Shakspere's Dramatic Art, and his relation to Calderon and 
Goethe, p. x. See also p. 118. Those foolish people who are better 
able to see ignorance and impiety in Shakspere, than wisdom and 
virtue, are provided on the pages which follow, with the completest 
explanations to be desired. 



LIFE IN ITS BEST SENSE. 309 

purity it really is — a temper, but a pursuit. The consequence 
is that to a great extent it is shut up in the church at the 
close of service, and left there till Sunday comes round 
again. The week-days are the true periods for religious 
action, which, rightly understood, is doing as we would be 
done by, and performing acts of Christian usefulness ; while 
Sunday, in the proper idea of it, is a day for receiving and 
communicating specific instruction in sacred things, and 
joining with our brethren in the externals of ritual worship. 
If it be possible to carry pride, selfishness, avarice, cheerful- 
ness, diligence, into the execution of our daily work, it is 
quite as competent to us to carry into it a religious spirit, 
without which, in fact, religious action is merely show. Two 
things are greatly to be distrusted in regard to religion — an 
inactive profession, and rigor and multitude of ceremonials, 
which latter, with the truly religious, are nevertheless ob- 
served, and even more sedulously, only with this distinction, 
that they are without advertisement to the world. " True 
religion," as Charles Lamb tells us, " prescribes a kind of 
grace, not only before meals, but before setting out for a 
pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a pleasant meet- 
ing ; a grace before reading any author that delights us."* 

181. Being the highest kind of life, the Religious is that 
to which Scripture chiefly alludes. Jesus, in particular, 
rarely speaks of man's animal, organic life; he concerns 
himself with what vitalizes the soul, and introduces it to 
immortality in heaven. When life in the sense of the 
future state is referred to in the Bible, it always implies 
antecedent religious life on earth ; necessarily so, because no 
man can live in heaven who has not first lived religiously 
here. Religion is a marriage in the soul, and in heaven 
there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. It must 



* Elia, " Grace before Meat." 



310 SCRIPTURAL MEANINGS OF THE WORD "LIFE." 

be consummated in this life, if at all. No one who is ac- 
customed to peruse the Word of God attentively is a 
stranger to these things. For completeness' sake some few 
illustrations may nevertheless be adduced, i. e., of the word 
" life," as used in its sense of the religious. " He that hath the 
Son, hath life ; and he that hath not the Son, hath not life." 
" Keep my commandments and live." " He that followeth 
after righteousness and mercy findeth lye." " To be car- 
nally-minded is death, but to be spiritually-minded is life." 
" In the pathway of righteousnesss is life; in the pathway 
thereof there is no death." The same is meant in all such 
expressions as " enter into life," " light of life," " word of 
life," " bread of life •" where it is plain that something is 
intended far higher, far more transcendental, than can be 
identified or connected with mere animal, temporal vitality. 
Every such passage must of course be interpreted on its own 
basis and by its own context ; to read them aright, however, 
we should act on the admirable maxim of Bishop Heber, 
that the best means of understanding any single passage of 
Scripture is to acquire an intimate and long acquaintance 
with the whole of the sacred volume. It is instructive to 
observe that the terms used to denote life in the original 
languages of the Bible, announce on the very face of the 
matter, that different ideas of it are intended. Thus, in the 
New Testament, while the animal, temporal life is called 
(pi>yff], the religious life, both as enjoyed here and as con- 
tinued hereafter, is distinguished, almost uniformly as Of^y]. 
Those who are interested in the Scriptural usages of the 
word life, will do well to consult a fine old volume, curiously 
and immensely learned, by Richard Brocklesby — "An Ex- 
plication of the Gospel Theism, and the Divinity of the 
Christian Religion," Book iv. chap. 10, sect. 12, pp. 975 — 
993. (1706.) 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

J^lFJE JREAJOIZEl) BT A.CTIVITY— ACTION THE LAW OF 
BAVPINESS. 

182. As the operations and phenomena of physical life 
resolve universally into Motion, so do those of the spiritual 
life into Activity. The reason is that the soul, like the 
body, and nature universally, is a subject of continual 
change, and dej)ends upon its changes for all its energy and 
pleasures. Like the body again, it acts both secretly within 
itself, and externally, upon what environs it. The exter- 
nalized activities are fulfillments of the inner, and are possi- 
ble only as effects of them ; the secret or interior ones form 
that sleepless life of desire, memory, and imagination, which 
gives so beautiful an assurance that we are immortal. 
Whatever we may seem to ourselves to be, we are never in 
reality unoccupied ; the thinking powers and the affections 
may appear to be at rest, we may be quite unconscious that 
they are otherwise, but they never cease from action alto- 
gether ; the spiritual heart, like the physical, is in ceaseless 
throb. That which we commonly call activity is thus only 
pictorial, and but a part of what we effect; the essential 
transpires beneath, in the silent chambers of the soul, and 
so restlessly that no exertion of body can ever set forth the 
half of it. To think is virtually to act ; so are to love, to 
hope, to muse. Men are not to be considered idle because 
we do not see them incessantly working with their hands. 
That idleness exists there is no doubt, and that not a little 

311 



312 EEVERIE. 

of it is utterly shameful ; but we should be cautious how we 
charge idleness upon any man too hastily, for it often hap- 
pens that the idlest to appearance are precisely those who 
work the hardest. Before a man is set down as idle, it 
should be asked what is his aptitude for seeing ; for never 
since the world began, did an indolent heart and mind dwell 
in the same body with open eyes. The truly idle man is 
the selfish and unintellectual one, "spinning on his own 
axis in the dark." Still, it is by the vigor and effectiveness 
with which this essential activity of the soul is played forth 
into the world around that it is to be estimated ; and unless 
we see signs and tokens of it in the shape of deeds, we are 
justified in sloAvness of acknowledgment. In fact, it be- 
comes real only by impersonation into deed, for until 
thought and affection utter themselves on society, they are 
only inutile visions. As a man's health and strength are 
not determined by the bare circumstance of our knowledge 
that his blood is circulating, but by the energy with which 
we see him use his limbs and organs generally ; so the life 
of the soul is to be judged of, not by its invisible dreamings, 
but by its outward, sensible manifestations. Reverie, 
though most wholesome services are sometimes wrought by 
it, is but the j^hyllomania or running to leaf of the soul ; the 
exclusively right purpose of spiritual life is the blossom and 
fruit of external act. "By their fruits shall ye know them." 
We tell Avhat a man is, or as it is well-phrased, what he is 
" made of," by what he does; not, however, by what he does 
once, or occasionally, fine as the deed may be, but by what 
he continues to do, and persists in doing, spite of all hin- 
drances. Cleverness, parts, talent, so called, can be taken 
no account of till they come out. A man of mere " capa- 
city undeveloped," as Emerson says, "is only an "organized 
day-dream with a skin on it." Genius itself is no genius if 
it stay in-doors. " Genius unexerted is no more genius than 



ACTION AND ENJOYMENT. 313 

a bushel of acorns in a forest of oaks. There may be epics 
in men's brains, just as there are oaks in acorns, but the 
tree and the book must come out before we can measure 
them." A thing of names and definitions innumerable. Ge- 
nius, whatever its particular attitude or features, is the high- 
est development of the energy of the soul; its certificate and 
office, as with the great function of the body which corre- 
sponds to it, or the procreation of offspring, which is the 
highest development of physical energy, is that it again im- 
parts life ; but until life has sprung up under its mighty 
impulse, till we feel the world the richer for it, to call it ge- 
nius is ridiculous and false. Genius is known by its acti- 
vity; dumb and unprolific genius are but appellations of the 
want of it. Let none, then, stand still in the supposition 
that because the soul works, and works diligently, of its own 
accord, a lofty spiritual life will necessarily be present ; no- 
thing is vital and substantial till it be ultimated into body 
or performance. So completely is action identified with life, 
that it is the natural metaphor for its lapse and progress. 
"Age" is derived from agere, " to do ;" the very word agere 
is used by Tacitus for " to live ;" " he is thirty years of age" 
is literally " he has acted for thirty years." 

183. That which is the truest sign of a thing is always its 
chief ornament and blessedness. Life, accordingly, is a 
delight just in the degree that it is consecrated to Action, 
or the conscious, volitional exercise of our noblest capabili- 
ties. Action and enjoyment are contingent upon each other; 
when we are unfit for work we are always incapable of 
pleasure ; work is the wooing by which happiness is won. 
The exercise even of our most ordinary bodily flmctions is 
a source of pleasure — breathing, for example. If not 
directly recognized as such, it is simply because of its unin- 
terruptedness, beautifully illustrating that in order to the 
complete sense of happiness in the soul, there must be con- 
27 



314 ACTION AND ENJOYMENT. 

sciousness of being employed. All physical pleasures depend 
for the maximum of their delightfulness, on continual cessa- 
tion and recurrence, often on slight movements and undu- 
lations, just sufficient to give keener edge to their renewal in 
the next instant ; similarly, but in a far higher degree, all 
our spiritual, or mental and emotional pleasures, come of 
constant action, unceasingly recapitulated. So inseparably 
connected are the ideas of action and enjoyment, that when- 
ever in nature we behold free movement, it awakens agree- 
able emotions ; when, for example, in the calm air of a 
summer's evening we watch the insects weaving their mazy 
dances, we exclaim instinctively, how happy they are ! In 
many languages, happiness and fruitfulness, both of them 
results and indications of activity, are denoted by the same 
word, as when the Latia poet calls the apple tree felix, the 
unproductive wild olive infelix oleaster. The proximate 
cause of this great interdependence is that man is a creature 
of unbounded Wants. It is Want that spurs us on to 
activity, in order that we may satisfy the want; were it 
possible for us to appease all wants as fast as they arise, we 
should be the most miserable and forlorn of beings. This 
is why we find such keener pleasure in the chase of an 
object than in the capture of it; why possession satisfies 
only in the degree that it is a new beginning. It is not, 
says Helvetius, in the having acquired a fortune, but in the 
acquiring it ; not in having no wants, but in satisfying them ; 
not in having been prosperous, but in prosperity, that hap- 
piness essentially consists. The miser grows old enjoying 
rather than wearied of life ; the heir who comes into posses- 
sion of his hoard dies of ennui; — unless he know beforehand, 
it should be added, wherein the advantage of wealth mainly 
consists, namely, in the power which it gives to an intelligent 
possessor to diversify and dignify his pursuits, and thus to 
multiply and ennoble his emotions, or practically, his wants. 



IDLENESS AND INFELICITY. 315 

184. In order that good and honorable wants shall always 
require a certain amount of exertion to appease them, and 
thus that our zeal shall be kept burning, all those things 
which humanity most needs are by a wise and benevolent 
Providence made the most difficult to procure. The silver 
is hidden and the gold is buried ; every gift of the field 
requires man's cooperation before he can enjoy it; every 
truth, even of the most universal interest and the most 
practical tendency, has to be patiently and perseveringly 
inquired for. Nothing in the world that is worth having is 
gratis ; everything has to be met half-way between God and 
ourselves ; and the more our experience of Divine Provi- 
dence enlarges, the more deeply do we feel how beneficent is 
the ordinance that it should be so ; how inglorious and nega- 
tive would be our destiny were there nothing left for us to 
effect as of ourselves. "Ask, and ye shall have," is equally 
true in its reverse ; neglect to ask, and ye shall 7iot have. 
Whatever God's awaiting privileges, everywhere the law is 
that they must be sought. Directly a tree neglects to assert 
its arboreity, it ceases to be a tree, and lapses into mould. 
Directly that a man falls into idleness and inactivity of soul, 
ceasing thereby from the true exercise of his human nature, 
he sinks into infelicity and animalism. A very simple 
formula comprises the whole matter ; the re-action of man 
in response to the primary action of God, constitutes the 
vast blessedness it is to Live. " Did the Almighty," says 
Lessing, " holding in his right hand Truth, and in his left 
Search after Truth, deign to proffer me the one I should 
prefer, in all humility, but without hesitation, I should 
request Search after Truth." The most blessed of men is 
he who, working with his own hands for his daily bread, 
reaps delight from the exercise of his intelligence upon his 
toils, and feels a holy harmony between the munificence of 
God and the duties which pertain to himself. The dream 



316 ACTION AND CHEERFULNESS. 

of an existence perennially workful, and yet sweet, free and 
poetic, such as has visited men in every age, is not so vision- 
ary as they have fancied, but it rests with the dreamer to 
clothe it in reality. 

185. Without action there can be no cheerfulness — the 
prime need as well as token of a true and happy life. 
Doubtless there is a native, spontaneous cheerfulness of 
spirit, but that which keeps cheerfulness alive is nothing else 
than activity, sedulously addressed to some worthy end. 
This is a secret worth knowing, since without cheerfulness 
neither the intellect nor the affections can expand to their 
full growth, which is for life never to reach its proper alti- 
tude ; while nothing is more surely fatal to it than gloom, 
moroseness, and discontent, unless it be the petty envyings, 
jealousies, and suspicions, the toadstools of the human heart, 
which sprout from the same foul soil, or indolent inactivity. 
Who are the people most generally given to talking scandal? 
Those who for want of some enlivening occupation become 
peevish and impatient, and know little or nothing about 
cheerfulness. Having nothing to agreeably engage the 
mind, the temptation to assume the office of censor over 
their neighbors is too strong to resist, the whole heart be- 
comes tainted and purulent, and the very occupations that 
make others lively become an eye-sore. Every one has 
noticed the cheerfulness which comes of a little bustle in 
which all parties are concerned; how ill-tempers subside, 
and Grossest faces become bland. A result as much more 
solid and graceful as the instrumentality is nobler, infallibly 
follows regular and solid devotion of the soul to aims that 
demand its best imaginings. The beginning of idleness is an 
ignoble ruling love. The wants which come of such a love 
are few and soon satisfied, since that which is lowest is 
always easiest to reach, and hence it is incessantly left des- 
titute. Nothing so effectually prevents idleness as a noble 



ENNUI. 317 

sympathy. The indolent rich, who fancy themselves weak 
and invalided when they are simply stagnant for want of a 
great purpose, would become sprightly and well directly, 
did they but enter on some genial and generous love, which 
would impel them into varied occupations. The very rest- 
lessness which frets them shows that action is the soul of 
life. Do something they must; this is a necessity they can- 
not evade, for absolute inactivity is impossible: it is nature's 
law that employment shall go on with every one in some 
sort ; but in the degree that the inevitable something is mean 
and indeterminate, the end of the pursuit is mortifying and 
vain. God knows the means to make us work soberiy and 
usefully. Do you see any one at a loss how to spend his 
time, undecided where to go, walking through dry places, 
seeking rest, and finding none? Be assured that individual 
finds existence a burden, and is a total stranger to its bloom 
and true emoluments. Many sights are melancholy, but 
none are worse than the listless, jaded countenances of those 
who have nothing worthy to devote their energies to. Yet 
these faces could beam with intelligence. Every man is 
happy by birth-right. It is his power to be happy that 
makes him able to be miserable; the capacity for en7iui 
being, in fact, one of the signatures of his immortality. Why 
brutes never suffer ennui is simply because they are inca- 
pable of noble delights. How inexcusable it is, if not 
shamefiil and disgraceful, to have nothing but what is low 
and transitory to think about, and thus to fall into such a 
state of dullness, scarcely needs an observation. Were the 
world empty, were it a silent, barren waste, without a tree 
or a blade of grass, there might possibly be an excuse; but 
overflowing as it does with the most beautiful curiosities, 
nothing is so utterly indefensible as to let a single waking 
hour die blank. Thanks be to God, as soon as a man de- 
sires to seek, he is always enabled to find; directly he feels 
27* 



318 HOME AMUSEMENTS. 

his heart and mind swell with a great desire, he finds the 
world ready and waiting to supply him. Even though 
busily engaged throughout the day in commercial or do- 
mestic avocations, the dolcefar niente which our poor Aveari- 
ness is so apt to plead in the evening, and which no wise 
man ever refuses to listen to altogether, is a principle only 
to be admitted under the protest that the proper rest for 
man is change of occiqxdion. There are few kinds of busi- 
ness which fatigue both body and mind at once; while one 
toils, the other almost necessarily reposes; when the one 
ceases work, nature rules that the other shall be fittest to 
begin ; and that is a rare case indeed where either body or 
mind is debarred all opportunity of healthful and useful 
occupation when its turn to work comes on. Man is not so 
imperfectly constituted, nor is the world so defectively 
framed, as for him to be constrained to look for pastime and 
relaxation anywhere but in change from one improving em- 
ployment to another; it may be questioned whether the 
sweetness of Home can ever be truly enjoyed where the lead- 
ing recreation does not take the shape of some intelligent 
and pretty pursuit, such as the formation of an herbarium, 
or the use of the microscope or pencil. Boys would not 
incessantly be in mischief and trouble were they encouraged 
to study natural history; girls would be far livelier and 
com]3anionable, and also enjoy better health, were they 
tramed to fixed habits of mental employment. The delight 
of a single hour of recreation in art or science, outweighs a 
whole life-time of mere frivolities ; before the picture of this 
delight, could it be brought home to him, the mere trifler 
would sink in dismay. Finding our pastime in such pur- 
suits, we render ourselves independent of the casualties of 
time and place, and secure an arbor of our own, where none 
can molest. Accustoming ourselves to live in ideas, sorrow 
and misfortune lose their sting. We discover that though 



ART OP CONVERSATION, 819 

disajtpointed of our greatest and most cherished hopes, that 
is no reason Avhy we should be impatient, or unhappy, or no 
longer given to pleasant wishes and desires. We get to live 
rather in that same kind of well-tempered hope and content- 
edness both in one, which leads men to plant trees for the 
future. "To have always," says D'Israeli, "some secret, 
darling idea to which we can have recourse amid the noise 
and nonsense of the world, and which never fails to touch 
us in the most exquisite manner, is an art of happiness that 
fortune cannot deprive us of." Many things may furnish 
such an idea; we have shown where they may be found. 
ISTepenthe still grows plentiful and green ; the world is foil 
of sweet places where we may rest ourselves, and eat of the 
lotus. We have no need to court gaiety in order to be 
happy ; nor yet a large circle of acquaintance. Few would 
longer trouble themselves about mere "diversions," were 
they once to feel what it is to possess the art of self-recrea- 
tion among the untaxed gifts of nature. 

186. While our leisure is honored and agreeably occupied 
by such pursuits, materials are acquired also for that most 
invaluable of the Fine Arts, the art of Conversation, desti- 
tute of Avhich, no family or social circle can be thoroughly 
happy. Not that mere dry scientific facts of themselves can 
serve its purposes, because the best, most living part of con- 
versation is emotional, imaginative, bird-like. Moreover, 
the richest conversation may be and often is wholly inde- 
pendent of such facts. But where brothers and sisters have 
each their tale to tell of something curious or mteresting 
seen in the day's progress, and have a common interest in 
each other's discoveries and acquisitions, the imagination 
soon finds wing, and the heart soon warms. To learn how 
to talk, let people learn how to do something, and get those 
about them to do the same. Of all the unbecoming things 
which true education would seek to anticipate and prevent, 



320 HURTFULNESS OF GOSSIP. 

that weak gossip about persons and clothes, eating and faux 
pas, which generally passes current as conversation, is the 
first that demands to be corrected. With the lover of noble 
employment, leisure indeed, either for trifling talk, or for 
trifles of any kind, exists no longer. No one ever wants to 
"kill time" who has fixed, intelligent work in hand. He 
very soon discovers that to kill time is to kill himself. The 
time-killer, the mere trifler, condemns it indeed in his own 
looks, for he always seems ashamed. We never find him, 
like Archimedes, shouting eopijxa! Such declarations 
of honorable joy are the privilege of the wisely active in li- 
beral arts ; no man, says Plutarch, was ever heard to cry 
out after a luxurious meal, ^e^pcoxa! or after another 
form of sensual pleasure, nsij-nlrf/ca ! Briefly, to make it- 
self happy is a duty which every created being, in propor- 
tion to its capacity, owes to itself and to God ; one of the 
chief characteristics of moral health. Lord Bacon tells us, 
is a " constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfac- 
tion ;" felicity, in its highest signification, implies all that 
can ennoble, while it excites our minds ; idleness and 
trifling, though they may excite, can never by any possibi- 
lity ennoble ; hence are the workers on intelligent pursuits, 
at once the dutiful to God, the healthy in soul, the hajDpy 
ones of their race. Si non ingentem, as Virgil says, " if they 
have not vestments curiously embroidered with gold, and if 
for them the white wool is not stained with the Assyrian 
dye— 

At secura quies, et nescia fallere vita. 
Dives opum variarum, — 
" Yet theirs is peace secure, and a life of solid, unfallacious hap- 
piness, rich in various opulence." 

187. Scientific and artististic recreations, pursued either 
purely on their own account, or with a view to agreeable 



PLEASURE AND BUSINESS. 321 

intellectual intercourses, by no means demand the intense 
application that many suppose. Neither is a little know- 
ledge the dangerous thing that others often fear. The in- 
firmity is not to have only a little, but to fancy that that 
little is a great deal. Neither are brilliant talents wanted ; 
a very moderate capacity will soon carry us out to sea. 
Nor, again, is there that incongruity between scientific re- 
creations and the ordinary duties of life which is not infre- 
quently alleged. " Business mvist be attended to," is one of 
the best and safest maxims in the world ; a man, as Dr. 
Johnson said, is never more usefully employed than when 
earning money. There is another maxim, however, fully as 
important, and founded upon as great a principle, and that 
is, the intervals of business must be attended to, implying 
that there is none of the incongruity supposed. No one can 
sharpen his intellectual faculties, or widen the range of his 
knowledge, without becoming more skilful and successful in 
the business or profession in which he is engaged. What- 
ever tends to cheer the understanding in leisure moments, so 
far from being in antagonism to business thoughts, is com- 
plementary to them, and gives them zest. It is doubtful 
whether any man can heartily enjoy the country who does 
not spend a large part of every week in town-work ; and no 
less questionable whether any one so thoroughly enjoys 
business as he who turns to it as a change. The same prin- 
ciple applies to literary recreations. How long is the list 
of men distinguished in commerce, who have also shone in 
letters, even in literature sparkling with imagination ! The 
late Mr. Eoby, of Rochdale, author of the Traditions of 
Lancashire, is a memorable example. Mr. Roby, says his 
biographer, " was not inapt for the addition sum of the 
banker because he delved into legendary lore, or rushed into 
the realms of the imagination. He showed in his various 

performances that the poetic temperament is not in antago- 

0* 



322 PLAY. 

nism to the duties of life ; a truth the sooner recognized the 
better. Many of our best writers are not professionally so ; 
they sweeten a life of physical labor by intellectual activity, 
and society reaps the double harvest. In his ordinary life 
the author is but an ordinary man, and it is a monstrous ex- 
aggeration to suppose as many do, that he is always walking 
with his head among the stars and his feet among the flow- 
ers. It would not be difficult to show that the man who is 
engaged during the day in what are commonly called unin- 
tellectual employments, or in semi-intellectual ones, such as 
buying, selling, and casting accounts, has a decided advan- 
tage in his leisure moments, codei'is paribus, over him who 
has wholly to thinh. 

188. Employment, therefore, does not mean no amuse- 
ment ; the workers, are those who use their time instead of 
wasting it, have more holidays than any one else, for every 
change is a going out to play. When rational and unso- 
phisticated, play, commonly so called, is still work; at all 
events, no man ever played genially and heartily without 
gaining something by it, and thus gathering from it a fruition 
of work. Play, moreover, is perfectly compatible with work ; 
let no one suppose that art and science disallow it, or that they 
render play uninteresting and distasteful. Pastime and ftm 
are as great a need as occupation, and as great a luxury. 
He who refuses to play is but a stately fool; to sport and 
gambol with children is one of the sweetest lyric songs of 
life; grown people, however, should remember that as the 
end of all exertion, even the slightest, should be profit, play 
should always be based upon an intelligent idea. People 
may be mirthful without being silly, just as they may be 
grave without being gloomy; a mind in right order can 
descend into frolics as readily as it can soar into magnificent 
ideas; for it is the characteristic of well-disciplined intelli- 
gence, and of purity and earnestness of the ' affections, that 



USE OF AMUSEMENTS. 323 

they are universal in their capacity. It is this which makes 
the philosopher; the true idea of whom is that of an amia- 
ble and pious man, who with the profound and scientific 
combines the lively and the droll. "My idea of wise men," 
says some author, "needs that they shall be very lively: I 
don't call dull men wise." Plato and Aristotle were not 
always seen in their long robes, dignified and serious. No; 
they were good-natured fellows, who enjoyed a laugh with 
their friends like the rest of the world, and who loved, and 
hoped, and listened to a good story with as much zest as the 
least learned. " As much" did we say ? Culture of mind 
enables us to enjoy far more intensely when enjoyment is 
afloat than when our heads are ill-provided. Love-poetry 
owes to Plato a more exquisite stroke of nature than ever 
was penned by a mere writer of songs and valentines: — 
"While kissing Agathon, I had my soul upon my lips, for 
it came, the hapless, as if about to depart." Many persons, 
it is true, live without amusement; grave, dull, would-be 
moralists and sages; and certainly, pastime is not so indis- 
pensably necessary after the mental and physical constitu- 
tions have arrived at maturity, as before. It by no means 
follows, however, that such persons would not live happier 
and more useful lives if they resorted occasionally to the 
ordinary sports of mankind. None ever decry play and fun 
but those who are strangers to their value. The love of 
them is one of the signs of a great nature. All true genius 
is in its very essence, a joyous faculty; "wit" originally sig- 
nifies the very highest efforts of mind. It is only by looking 
around as well as upwards that a large and just conception of 
life is attainable, and therefore that life is truly realized. "A 
mind charged with vitality, and sustained by trust in God, 
will not only look cheerfully to the goal of its pilgrimage, 
but have ample stores of gladness to expend upon the 
journey. The Muses have left no diaries, or doubtless we 



324 ACTION THE SOURCE OP POWER. 

should find that they had their gipsy-parties and lively 
games; that they danced and sang for pure enjoyment; and 
visited mortal dreamers not only in inspiring vision, but 
sometimes to 

' Tickle men's noses as they lay asleep.' " 

In a word, though recreation with science and literature be the 
most solid and unfailing kind of play, it is not the only kind 
we need. With all his toil, and care, and penury of time, the 
man who devotes himself to learning, or science, or business, 
is no gainer in the end, if he do not take part sometimes in 
lively entertainments. For a while he may seem to suffer 
nothing; but the belief of his being able to dispense with 
such playing is only a delusion ; there is a heavy reckoning 
going on against him, which sooner or later will have to be 
paid in suffering and premature exhaustion. Work and 
play are reciprocally advantageous. While without due 
play, there is no effective working, on the other hand, in 
order to play heartily with the body, we must learn how to 
play heartily, in privacy, with the soul. No man thoroughly 
enjoys play, or knows what play really is, who cannot spend 
hours of solitude in comfort. 

189. In the degree that we employ ourselves, we acquire 
Power. As nature, ever shifting and transforming, is most 
beautiful and delicious when it is not strictly either spring, 
or summer, or autumn, — morning, noon, evening, or night; 
so, all the potency we ever possess, is referable to our mo- 
ments of action, or when we are experiencing or effecting 
Changes; the period of transition is that in which power is 
developed ; to acquire and to wield it, we must be forever 
seeking to quit the state we are in, and to rise into a higher 
one. Power, accordingly, which is only life under another 
name, is resolvable, essentially, into constant progression. 
It never consists in the having been, but always in the 



AIDS TO MAREIED HAPPINESS. 325 

becoming ; we flourish in proportion to our desire to emerge 
out of To-day. It is often asked concerning a stranger, 
Where does he come from ? The better question would be, 
Where is he going to f Never mind the antecedents, if he 
be now in some shining pathway. Other people are con- 
tinually heard wishing to be " settled." It may be useful to 
be settled as to our physical resources ; but to be settled in 
any other way is the heaviest misfortune that can befall a 
man, for when settled, he ceases to improve, and is like a 
ship stranded high and dry upon the sand. Who is the 
man from whose society and conversation we derive soundest 
pleasure and instruction ? Not he who, as it is facetiously 
said, has " completed his education," but he who, like a bee, 
is daily wandering over the fields of thought. The privilege 
of living and associating with a person who knows how to 
think, and is not afraid to think, is inestimable ; and no- 
where is it felt more profoundly than in the intimate com- 
panionship of wedded life. Rousseau finds in this need a 
beautiful argument for inspiring one's beloved, during the 
sweet, plastic days of betrothal, with a taste for the ameni- 
ties of nature, such as shall provide a source in after years, 
of lasting and mutual delight. How pleasing, when many 
summers of married love have thrown those hallowed days 
far into the rear, to note again the uncurling ferns of spring, 
wrapped so comfortably in their curious brown scales ; the 
pretty scarlet hedge-strawberries gathered for her hand, the 
delicate mosses, and the hundred other objects then first 
noticed, objects which set both mind and lips in action, 
invoking currents of sweet converse, kindling looks from 
which we turned to the sunshine for relief, and opening the 
way to long trains of agreeable and profitable contempla- 
tion, enlarged with every new impulse to mutual tenderness. 
The being afraid to think is the chief reason perhaps why 
the majority of people are so disinclined to think — to think, 

28 



326 TEUE PRINCIPLES OF EDUCATION. 

that is, beyond the little circle of their bodily wants. There 
can be few who are positively unable to think ; otherwise 
thought and happiness would not bear the close natural 
relation which they do. Put a grand idea before the gene- 
rality of people, and it seems to them like looking up a 
ship's mast from the deck. Yet it is not that they cannot 
ascend, using the proper means ; they let themselves be ter- 
rified away, fancying they are unable, when they are merely 
self-distrustful. Doubtless there is a difference in aptitude, 
but every one may become stronger if he will ; the worst 
unbelief is unbelief in one's self; it only needs confidence 
and a start ; whatever we may get from others, or from the 
world, has grown from germs such as we have also in our- 
selves — whence it is that in our readmg we are so continu- 
ally coming up with ideas that we feel to be our own ; nor 
is there anything more beautiful in creation than each man's 
own private soul, when fairly dealt with and elicited. Helen, 
when she explored nature for a model of a golden cup that 
she should ofier upon the altar of Diana as perfectly beau- 
tiful, found nothing more exquisite than her own bosom. 

190. Practically then — for to bring us to some practical 
conclusion is the sole use of such considerations — we learn ' 
from the great law of Action the spring of Happiness, that 
to encourage love of work is the first article of sensible 
Education. In eifect, this is the stimulating of the Intellect 
and the Afiections which has already been adverted to under 
other heads. All action, to be efficacious for good, must 
rise into a certain intensity; it must also be regular and 
determinate, and it is only training and culture that can 
make it so. As in the structure of plants and animals, 
where any organ is deficient, or there is departure from 
symmetry, it is uniformly referable to a weakening of the 
vital energies, or to restraint or diversion of them away 
from their proper office ; so when our experience of life is 



WOEK. 327 

infelicitous and unrewarding, it is because the natural 
activity of the soul has either been repressed, or neglected, 
or turned astray in early youth. The unhappy are those 
"who from want of practice cannot manage their thoughts, 
who have few to select from, and who, because of their 
sloth or weakness, do not roll away the heaviest," and these 
are precisely the individuals whom observation would per- 
ceive to be laboring under imperfect discipline of the 
spiritual activities, dating from the very commencement of 
education. Ordinarily, to the young, work is rendered so 
unattractive, and the idea of pleasure so entirely dissevered 
from it, that the first wears the semblance of a penalty, and 
the latter of the true object of existence. This is to com- 
pletely neutralize the design of work, and to despoil life of 
its highest luxuries. Pleasure is not bestowed on us to be 
made a motive ; still less is it to be deemed, as by many, a 
right of human existence, and its non-arrival an exhibition 
of Divine injustice. What we ought to let reign in our 
minds, is primarily, work, which translates itself, in every 
true soul, into the duty of development. Let the prseludia 
of stem and foliage be made the business, and the flowers 
will come of their own accord, and fill the air with fragrance. 
" In teaching," says the good Jean Paul, " accustom the boy 
to regard his future, not as a path from pleasures, though 
innocent, to other pleasures ; nor even as a gleaning, from 
spring-time to harvest, of flowers and fruits ; but as a time 
in which he must execute some long plan ; let him aim at a 
long course of activity — not of pleasure." Then he shows 
how privileged is such a course : " That man is happy, for 
instance, who devotes his life to the cultivation of an island, 
to the discovery of one that is lost, or to the extent of the 
ocean. I would rather be the court-gardener who watches 
and protects an aloe for fifteen years, until at last it opens 
to him the heaven of its blossom, than the prince who is 



328 WORK AND BODILY HEALTH. 

hastily called to look at the opened heaven. The writer of 
a dictionary rises every morning, like the sun, to move past 
some little star in his zodiac ; a new letter is to him a new 
year's festival, the conclusion of an old one a harvest-home." 
Bodily health, as well as spiritual, depends on work. Very 
many of the comj)laints so frequently heard from the deli- 
cate young women of our day, as want of vigor, inability to 
bear exposure, deficiency of strength to walk far, may be 
traced to other and earlier causes than supposed, settling at 
last into absence of well-trained mental power, such as 
would seek an outlet in useful and agreeable occupation. 
But mental power, let them understand, is not to be gained 
from senseless fiction, which leading, as it is almost sure to 
do in the end, to discontented dreams of what might have 
been, or should be, keeps the heart away from thankful jDer- 
ception and enjoyment of what is; it is to be got from no 
such miserable waste of time as this ; but from steady and 
well-directed reading of stories not fictitious, and from steady 
and systematic contemplation of the works of nature. 
Seeking to improve themselves as intelligent beings, our 
young ladies would not half as often want the doctor. 
Rational work they would find, moreover, less fatiguing 
than the very pastimes which they fancy true enjoyment. 
Under proper management, work never becomes irksome. 
When prematurely fatigued, it is not the action that has 
tired us, but want of ingenious and orderly methods. Work 
never killed or hurt any man who knew how to go about it. 
See what order there is in nature ! Along with sublimest 
activity, what smoothness and ease ! How still the growth 
of the plant, yet how rapid ! How peacefully the stars of 
midnight seem encamped ; yet before morning whole armies 
have disappeared ! So much is achieved, because every- 
thing is done in order, at the right time, intently, yet de- 
liberately, and the minutes never wasted in indecision. In 



WORK IN THE FUTURE STATE. 329 

work, then, consists the true pride of life. Grounded in 
active employment, though early ardor may abate, it never 
degenerates into indifference ; and age, as we have said 
before, lives in perennial youth. Life is a weariness only to 
the idle, or where the soul is empty, and better than to exist 
thus vacantly, is it for longevity as to birth-days to be 
denied. 

191. The consideration of this great principle. Action the 
spring of Happiness, though it is in regard to the present 
life that it practically concerns us, belongs as largely to 
right estimates of the life to come. Doubtless, the means by 
which we secure enjoyment upon earth, instruct us as to the 
proximate source of the enjoyments that will be felt in 
heaven, a subject that cannot be uninteresting to any man 
who reflects for a moment how long he hopes to live there. 
That the same re-action of man, in response to the primary 
action of God, which here makes life and happiness, will 
similarly engender it hereafter, we may gather, indeed, most 
plainly, from the divine oracles themselves. When we are 
told so consolingly, that to die is to go to rest, and that 
" Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest 
from their labors," it is not meant that by entering the future 
state we enter on a state of passiveness. There can be no 
happiness or holiness, even in heaven, if the life be one of 
mere quiescence. Do we not see, even in this world, that 
those who would have us understand by Remember the 
Sabbath-day to keep it holy, Remember to keep it idle, i. e., 
idle as regards everything but religious discipline; do we 
not see, even in this world, that they prescribe a course 
against which all nature rebels, and which fails from its very 
absurdity? How much more impossible will it be to keep 
holy the everlasting sabbath, except by supplementing its 
peculiar duties of praise and worship with useful and bene- 
volent occupations. The labors which will be "rested from" 

28 « 



330 GOD THE GREAT WORKER. 

are the resistance of temptations, the endurance of trials, 
the struggles with evil, whicli incessantly harass our tem- 
poral existence; all our chosen and happier activities will 
continue, in a more glorious manner, and with the perfect 
results which on earth are unattainable. The best and 
wisest of mankind have always had a conviction that it 
will be so. "He felt," says the memoir of Dr. Gordon, 
"that there would be no interval of unconsciousness, no ces- 
sation of activity, no intermission of enjoyment; that though 
the mode of existence would be changed, the existence itself 
would be neither destroyed nor suspended."* We may 
learn much from the very term that Scripture employs. It 
is never said that we shall rest from our work, only from 
"labor." Labor is that exertion which is irksome and 
painful; work that which is congenial, welcome, a delightful 
exercise. Labor is the toil of the soul and body upon things 
in opposition to them; work is the bestowal of their best 
energies on what pleases and recompenses. Work, rightly 
understood, is divine, and nothing that is divine can ever 
cease. It is divine because it comes out of the inmost spirit 
of goodness and love, and thus, primarily, from God, whereas 
indolence and laziness come of the very essence of evil. 
Who is the greatest workman in the universe? He who 
works, from out of His infinite Love, for the smallest insect 
as well as the immortal angel. That the wicked are often 
diligent, more diligent, possibly, than many of the good, is 
no objection; because the diligence of such does not come of 
their evil, as to its own intrinsic nature, but of its necessities; 
work must be done in order that the means may be procured 
whereby the appetites of the evil shall be indulged. The 
idea of an idle heaven is a very low and unintelligent one: 
it could only have arisen with the indolent upon earth ; and 



* The Christian Philosopher triumphing over Death, p. 177. 



MINISTRATION OP ANGELS. 331 

wherever found, we may be sure there is an indolent spirit 
underneath. Heaven, like the Lord himself, Avho to the 
pure ajDpears pure, who to the merciful appears merciful, is 
measured by each man according to his own character and 
inclinations, and if we would ask which view is nearer to the 
truth, we may be sure it is that which most exalts us. If 
true life consist in well-directed activity while we are here, 
assuredly the continuation of our life in heaven will derive 
its blessedness, in no slight degree, from the new and mag- 
nificent opportunities it will there enjoy. There will be an 
external world of nature to study, consisting of that inex- 
haustible store of spiritual objects and phenomena which 
forms the scenery of the spiritual world, and which is the 
prototype of the material worlds and their contents, and 
invitiag us to endless research and contemplation; there 
will also be good uses to fulfill, the prototypes of practical 
charity and affection upon earth, and which will be largely 
directed, there is every reason to believe, to the spiritual 
needs of the successive and interminable generations of men. 
Angel, literally "messenger," is not so much a designation 
of nature, as commonly supposed, as a title or name of 
office; and no office can be conceived more superb than that 
of aiding and protecting souls still upon their pilgrimage. 
That such functions are exercised, in other words, the doc- 
trine of the " ministration of angels," has soothed and encou- 
raged the virtuous of every age; the Grecian belief in daefxove<; 
or invisible attendant genii, was itself a recognition of the 
guardianship of that celestial fraternity, the "bright band" 
which gave cause to Archdeacon Hare to say so beautifully, 
that while it is blessed to have friends on earth, it is yet 
more blessed to have friends in heaven. Leigh Hunt, 
speaking of Shelley (whose virtues we should do well to 
remember before his failings), acknowledges this fine senti- 
ment in the most exquisite manner; "Alas! and he suffered 



332 BENJAMIN WEST. 

'■ for years, as Ariel did in the cloven pine ; but now he is out 
of it, and serving the purposes of Beneficence with a calm- 
ness befitting his knowledge and his love." Thus is our 
destiny, even in this world, sublime, if we will but serve 
God, and not Mammon. For the "spirits of just men made 
perfect" then come into company with us; they "encamp" 
around us, and "minister" to us, even as they themselves are 
ministered to by the Lord. It is no mere fancy of a fond 
mother that the smile of her sleeping infant comes of the 
angels' whisper. So lovely an idea would not live among 
the hallowed ones were it not the reflection of a heaven-sent 
truth; when the heart in its thankful musings lifts itself 
towards the skies, it is never sent away with a falsehood in 
it. Wonderful has been the effect upon mankind even of 
this little ministry. It was the smiling in her sleep of Ben- 
jamin West's infant niece that led him, though quite a boy, 
to use the pencil. He was placed to watch the cradle, and 
struck by the innocent smiles of his little charge, drew her 
as she lay. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

DEATS X2V MELATION TO THE SPIIilTTTAZ-ZIFE. 

192. If life be realized only in the degree that it is 
happy, then is an infelicitous existence only a kind of 
death ; and the man who experiences it, though he may 
walk about, eat, drink, and sleep like other men — virtually, 
and as regards all the true idea and design of life, is dead. 
It sounds strangely, but if there be a state of spirit which it 
is right, preeminently, to call Life, by reason of its excel- 
lence and exaltation, the contrary condition can be no other 
than what we have said. Life is where there are hope, 
faith, reverence, sense of the beautiful, the sentiment of reli- 
gion ; death is where these are absent or extinguished. 
Death, in fact, like Life, is no unitary thing ; there are as 
many ways of dying as of living, and as the highest kinds 
of life are those which belong to and express themselves in 
the Soul, in the Soul, too, are suffered the bitterest of deaths. 
In childhood we do not know this. Death's heaviest shafts 
seem to be those which fall on things external to us, as pa- 
rents, friends, companions ; but as our experience enlarges, 
we discover that no death is so sad, no death so momentous 
in its consequences, as the death of the things which die 
within. So true is this, that often the greatest epoch in a 
man's life is by no means the day of his physical death, but 
the day in which he has died to something more important 
to him than the whole world. " That which has died within 
us," says Hare, " is often the saddest portion of what Death 

333 



334 DEATH OF FEELINGS AND IDEAS. 

has taken away — sad to all, sad above measure to those in 
whom no higher life has been awakened. The heavy 
thought is the thought of what we were, of what we hoped 
and purposed to have been, of what we ought to have been, 
of what but for ourselves we might have been, set by the 
side of what we are, as though we were haunted by the 
ghost of our own youth. This is a thought the crushing 
weight of which nothing but a strength above our own can 
lighten." Death, accordingly, in its most sorrowful sense, 
is not the death of the body, but the death of feelings and 
ideas — ^the death of our love. For when men say that they 
have no " spirit" for a thing, or no " heart" for it, it is only 
another way of saying that they have no " love," which is 
practically to have no "life" for it. Spirit is breath, and 
the heart is figuratively the blood, and by the breath and 
the blood all life is circled in. So with the expressions 
" dead to hope," " dead to enjoyment," " dead to enterprise." 
Those who are thus lifeless are they who, having lost their 
property, or their animal pleasures, or who, having had 
their worldly schemes defeated, and have found no better 
things to set their affections on, have lost their love, for life^is 
union with the object of our love. "Nabal's heart died 
within him, and he became a stone." How sublime a 
contrast where those better things have been acquired ! 

Soft was the voice of the priest, and he spoke with an accent of 
kindness. 

But on Evangeline's heart fell his words as in winter the snow- 
flakes 

Fall into some lone nest from which the birds have departed. 
***** 

So was her love diffused, but like to some odorous spices, 

Suflfered no waste nor loss, though filling the air with aroma. 

Other hopes she had none, nor wish in life, but to follow 

Meekly, with reverent steps, the sacred feet of her Saviour. 



DEATH OF SPIRIT. 335 

Of all sad things in the world, the saddest yet is that which, 
living to appearance, in soul is dead. Not only in human 
beings is it witnessed : towns, countries, institutions, may lie 
dead, though alive, as pictured in that wonderful passage in 
the Giaour, so beautiful in the midst of its inexpressible 
mournfulness, where the still and melancholy aspect of the 
once busy and glorious shores of Greece is compared to the 
features of the dead, — 

Ere the first day of death hath fled. 

* * * -x- 

Such is the aspect of this shore, 
'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more ! 

Every man experiences a measure of such death. Every 
"mortification" we endure is literally "a death." Secu- 
larly, at least, if not in the higher sense of the words, like 
the flowers of the Cistus, we " die daily ;" and the more that 
the temporal is loved, the more does the death af&ict. For 
it is of attempting to love the transitory and perishable — so 
far as it is capable of being loved — and thus of loving what 
is. only a continual vicissitude, that death of spirit comes. 
That which undergoes vicissitude has only a seeming life in 
it, and therefore the love of it, so far as it is worthy the name 
of love, can never uphold itself into a true and felicitative 
life, for this comes only of loving the unchangeable. " Be- 
fore the eye of Truth," says Fichte, " all life which finds its 
love in the temporary, and seeks its enjoyment in any other 
object than the etei'nal and unchangeable, is vain and un- 
blessed, because it loves only death." 

193. What we have chiefly spoken of is the death of feel- 
ings having relation to temporal and external things; far 
more solemn and momentous is the death of those which 
have relation to morals and religion. Both kinds might be 
contemplated as to the place of their beginning, which is 



336 REAL DEATH IS LOSS OF VIRTUE. 

likewise twofold, i. e., in the intellect or in the affections. 
The duality in the springs of life involves duality in the 
place of death. As physical death is referable either to the 
heart or to the lungs, so is spiritual death referable either to 
the will or the understanding, and is marked by correspond- 
ent phenomena. "The d.7toXidcbat(; or petrifaction of the 
soul," says Epictetus, "is double; in the one case it is stupi- 
fied in its intellectuals; the other is when it is dead in its 
morals. He who is thus dead, is not to be disputed with." 
But there is no need to analyze so minutely. It is sufficient 
to distinguish between death to what is good, and death to 
what is bad, whether of an intellectual or an emotional 
character. The Scriptural expressions of being "dead in 
trespasses and sins," and of being "dead to sin," exactly 
illustrate the difference. In every age there has been a 
perception that real death consists in loss of wisdom and 
virtue. "It is a doctrine of immemorial antiquity that the 
real death pertains to those who on earth are immersed in 
the Lethe of its passions and fascinations, and that the real 
life commences only when the soul is emancipated from 
them." Evil and falsity bring spiritual life to an end, just 
as diseases do animal life. "What then are we to say?" 
concludes Philo. " Surely that death is of two kinds — the 
one being the death of the man; the oth^r, the peculiar 
death of the soul. The death of the man is the separation 
of the soul from the body; the death of the soul is the de- 
struction of virtue and the admission of vice."* Aristophanes, 
in a well-known passage, calls the depraved citizens of 
Athens "dead men," and founded, no doubt, on the corres- 
pondence thus acknowledged, was the belief among his 
countrymen and other ancient nations, that to see or touch 
dead bodies was a great pollution. Jodrell gives numerous 



* Allegories of the Sacred Laws, Book i., end. 



SCRIPTURAL MEANINGS OP DEATH. 337 

illustrations, both from historical and poetic sources, (iii. 15.) 
In the ancient Jewish law, for the same original reason, it 
was one of the things required to be followed up by " cleans- 
ing." " This is the law, when a man dieth in a tent, all that 
come into the tent, and all that is in the tent, shall be un- 
clean seven days." * Vice as identified with death, is not 
necessarily vice in its baser forms, or crime; it is wilful vio- 
lation of the laws of God, whether externalized into criminal 
act or not; and it is this which is chiefly intended by 
"death" in Scripture. "Life" is attainment of union with 
God, founded on reconciliation with one's self; "death" is 
secession from truth and goodness. When, for instance, 
Christ says that he shall come to judge "the quick and the 
dead," the meaning is, all mankind, both good and evil. So 
when David exclaims, "In death there is no remembrance 
of thee," he intends, those who cease to obey God, cease also 
to think of God. "Lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep 
of death," is a prayer to quicken the soul with new aptitude 
for sacred things. It is the very same death which is 
intended in the parable of the Prodigal Son — "For this my 
son was dead, and is alive again ;" and which the Apostle 
alludes to when he says, "We know that we have passed 
from death unto life." In its direst degree, this is the death 
which on the other side of the grave becomes "hell," and 
which begins it even in this world. It is by no metaphor 
that men who have steeped themselves in iniquities, cry out 
that they sufier the tortures of the pit. As no man enters 
heaven after the death of the material body, but he who has 
received heaven into his soul in this life; so "hell" is an 
intensifying and consolidating forever, of infernal states that 



* Numbers xix. 14. See also chap, vi., and Leviticus, chaps, xv., 
xxi., &c. 



29 P 



338 DEATH VIEWED AS REJUVENESCENCE. 

have already been sunk into. "Though this a heavenly- 
angel," exclaims laehimo, looking at Imogen asleep, 

"Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here." 

Death, in Scripture, when signifying death to virtue, poten- 
tially means also the eternal perdition of the soul, as in 
James v. 20, whence it is that we are so earnestly urged to 
fly from it, seeing that after the dissolution of the material 
body, ability to escape is at an end. 

194. Death to what is evil is rejuvenescence. Though 
consecrated by use in Scripture, it is a mode of expression, 
therefore, which an exacter rhetoric would supersede with 
"life to good." A man cannot properly be said to "die to 
evil," because evil is in itself death. He can only die to 
that which is essentially Life, or good. "Death to evil" is 
like " Blessed Life," a phrase which, " according to the true 
view of the matter," says Fichte, "has in it something super- 
fluous, to wit, life is necessarily blessed; the thought of an 
tmblessed life carries with it a contradiction. Death alone 
is unblessed. What is unblessed, does not really and truly 
live; but in most of its component parts is sunk in death 
and nothingness." By whichever name we call it, — death 
to evil, or return to youth and life, — nothing ever occurs in 
the soul of man which more deeply and vitally aflects him : 
for it carries with it the change which it is the office of re- 
ligion to promote, or what Scripture terms regeneration. 
Hence it is the true "resurrection." That which is com- 
monly so called, is simply the exchange of one's sphere of 
action, induced by the dissolution of the material body ; — an 
exchange which in no way affects or alters the moral char- 
acter, and is nothing more, essentially, than removal from 
one country to another is in this present life. The place of 
abode is new, but the man is the same. Resurrection is 
rising, not remaining as we were. It is not barely to enter the 



SPRING AN EMBLEM OP RESURRECTION. 339 

spiritual world, which is the destiny of all, both good and 
evil, but to rise into a loftier and diviner state of soul, such 
as must be attained in this life, if at all. "He that is un- 
just, let him be unjust still ; and he that is filthy, let him be 
filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous 
still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still." The 
av6.aaro.aiz of the wicked, as Olshausen remarks, is only a 
part of the Qdvaroz deuvepoz. The resurrection, popularly 
so called, like every other great fact in the economy of the 
universe, is thus a representative occurrence. Attaching to 
all mankind, both good and evil, it is not a doctrine pecu- 
liarly of theology, but one of the simple laws of nature; 
and therefore an intimation and exponent of a truth yet 
grander than itself, and ready for all to realize who will. 
When man disengages himself from his earthly vesture, and 
passes from the temporal into eternity, he presents a picture 
of the soul which detaches itself from evil, and ascends 
into the high and lovely life of Christianity. That the true 
resurrection is the regeneration of the soul, is shown by our 
Lord's own divine words — "Jam the resurrection." Doubt- 
less, in his ascent from the tomb, we have the type of man's 
immortality ; but this is not so much the doctrine intended 
in the words in question, as that resurrection is to acknow- 
ledge and follow him while we are yet on earth. 

195. Such also is the resurrection which alone is repre- 
sented and foreshadowed in the beautiful phenomena of the 
Spring, so enthusiastically pointed to by preachers of every 
creed and age. When the seeds vegetate, and cover the 
earth with leaves and flowers ; when the trees bud, and 
foliage takes the place of snow and icicles, the resurrection 
that goes on is a rejuvenescence of life, beauty, vigor ; no 
dead thing reappears; nothing that is defaced comes up 
again ; there is no portraiture of the re-animation of mere 
dead material bodies, only of the deathlessness and energy 



340 THE FIRST AND SECOND RESURRECTION. 

of moral excellence. Nowhere in the whole scope of nature 
is there ever seen resurrection of what is dead, or emble- 
matic of death ; all its revivifying processes attach to things 
which are alive and representative of life. It is only where 
the principle and power of life have never been for one 
instant interrupted, that resurrection takes place ; resurrec- 
tion of that which has altogether perished and decomposed, 
as the material body, which in itself is neither good nor 
evil, is never in the least degree illustrated ; and from this 
single circumstance, the current doctrine of the resurrection, 
or that which regards it as a return of the soul into the 
material body from which it had been separated — the latter 
being transmogrified into a " spiritual body" — may be re- 
garded as much in need of revision. The expectation of 
such return is in reality no more than a varied shape of the 
doctrine of the old Egyptians, which led them to embalm 
the corpses of their dead, to be, they imagined, in course of 
time re-animated by the relenting soul. Any theological 
dogma which is not illustrated by the Divine economy as it 
works visibly in the material creation, may legitimately be 
demurred to. There is no truth vouchsafed to man but is 
inscribed over again in the beautiful volume of the earth 
and sky ; and conversely, the point where nature no longer 
speaks, is the point where truth also is at an end. The test 
of truth is that nature mirrors it. 

196. With this right understanding of the word before 
our eyes, we see what is meant by " Blessed and holy is he 
that hath part in the first resurrection." The second is 
simply to enter the spiritual world, which all men do in due 
course; some to the "resurrection of life," some to the 
" resurrection of condemnation ;" but that which is " blessed 
and holy," is the resurrection which the soul has already 
experienced in the body. It is this "first resurrection" 
which is referred to in the encouraging and consolatory 



NO RESUREECTION WITHOUT DEATH. 341 

verse — " Precious unto the Lord is the death- of his saints." 
Some think that this means the death of the body. Nay; 
what God rejoices in, is the death of selfishness and bad 
passions. There can be no resurrection, either real or repre- 
sentative, except contingently on death; hence it is said, 
that a man must " hate his own life," and " except he lay 
down his life." " Life" here denotes that particular, selfish, 
temporal love by which every man is animated while unre- 
generate, impelling some in one way, some in another, and 
which must be subordinated to a higher one if he would 
rise. This death, therefore, does it behoove us strenuously 
and unceasingly to contemplate ; and not only so, it needs 
that, with the Apostle, we " die daily," that is, that we reju- 
venize daily, exchanging what is unlovely in our affections 
for some diviner attachment, and replacing our childish, 
foolish, and unprofitable knowledges with wisdom at once 
comely and substantial. Every day that something is not 
effected towards these two ends, is a day ill-spent. Few, 
very few, are the truths and emotions which, however rela- 
tively excellent, do not require to be replaced by still supe- 
rior ones, or at least to be rectified and expanded ; and no- 
where is the necessity more urgent than in those which have 
reference to religion and theology. If the first and greatest 
of existing evils be indifference to practical religion, want 
of enlarged understanding of spiritual things is unquestion- 
ably the second. People grow up, live and die, in the rudi- 
mentary knowledge of religious truths communicated to 
them in their childhood, and think their little leaf is all the 
forest. Inquire if they have read the last new novel or 
review, and it is considered a reproach to have to say " No." 
Ask what new fact they have learned in geography, or other 
physical science, and a reply is ready. But inquire, even 
of " religious" people, what new idea they have of heaven, 
or of God, or the human soul, or the prophecies, and they 
29 » 



342 THEOLOGY A PROGEESSIVE SCIENCE. 

wonder what you mean, or what there can be to learn. 
Some abstain from search for fear of their " faith" becoming 
weakened. Faith in Christ, says Vater, can be no hindrance 
to critical and philosophical inquiries ; otherwise he would 
himself impede the progress of truth. The best token that 
genuine rejuvenescence of the soul is going on in us, is, that 
the Word of Grod becomes daily a richer mine to our 
intelligence. 

197. Death implies a place of burial, and as death in 
Scripture denotes, on the one hand, declension from virtue; 
on the other, escape from the power of evil, or regeneration ; 
so do the words grave, tomb, and sepulchre. The unre- 
generate man is not only dead, but as truly entombed as a 
corpse beneath the sods. In the prophets there are many 
examples, as when Isaiah, speaking of the " rebellious," says 
that "they remain among the graves." Similarly, in the 
New Testament, dwelling "among the tombs" denotes living 
in the shades and negations of irreligiousness. The "lu- 
natic" loved to dwell among the tombs. He impersonates 
the man who is dead to spiritualities. If it be "madness" 
to act recklessly in secular things, surely it must be " mad- 
ness" to forget God. Properly regarded, insanity is of two 
kinds; one comes of the brain being diseased, so that the 
soul, healthy in itself, cannot use it; this is insanity com- 
monly so called: the other is when it is the soul that is 
diseased, albeit the brain be perfectly healthy ; this is infi- 
delity and irreligiousness. The Pharisees of the human race 
our Lord calls whited sepulchres, because, making a fair 
show on the outside, within they are full of dead men's 
bones. In the sense of regeneration or newness of life, there 
is no more beautiful instance than that in Ezekiel xxxvii. 
12, "Behold, O, my people, I will open your graves, and 
cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into 
the land of Israel, and ye shall know that I am the Lord, 



CONSECRATION OF BURIAL-PLACES. 343 

and I will put my spirit in you, and ye shall live." St. 
John records how the promise was fulfilled: "I say unto 
you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall 
hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall 
live." (v. 25.) A moment's reflection will show that these 
words can in neither case refer to the resurrection after the 
death of the body. They can mean nothing else but the 
"quickening to grace." The raising of Lazarus by the 
Lord, and of the widow's son at the city of Nain, were in- 
tended as signs that the same power should revive men who 
had been long " dead in trespasses and sins." It was because 
the Jewish religion was so essentially and minutely repre- 
sentative, or prefigurative of the Christian religion which 
was to "fulfill" it, that the Jews were so desirous of burial 
in the land of Canaan, the Scriptural symbol of heaven. 
Interment in that country was emblematical and prefigura- 
tive of resurrection into Paradise. The inhumation of the 
material body is the resurrection of the spiritual, and where 
the former is symbolically deposited, the latter symbolically 
becomes an inhabitant. It is for the same reason, though it 
may be unsuspected, that Christians bury their dead either 
in or closely adjacent to their churches, the representatives 
of the temple not made with hands. Every observance and 
ceremony of this nature is founded on the relation of things 
physical to things spiritual. If, then, a man would vitally 
experience what resurrection is, what it essentially is to rise 
from the grave, let him, with God's help, "die unto sin." 
That he will survive the death of his material body, he may 
assure himself, for it is not given him to choose, but whether 
he will rise or not, he himself must elect. 



CHAPTER XX. 

MEJVrENJESCENCE.* 

198. More than once in previous chapters we have 
spoken of Rejtjvenescence ; it now becomes important to 
treat the subject independently and connectedly. The most 
glorious principle of nature, impressed upon its every object, 
Life and Death themselves are only other names for Reju- 
venescence ; the history of the world and of its contents, in 
all their variety and phases, is no more than the history of 
its operation ; the one great poetic idea of the universe, all 
phenomena and splendors, spiritual as well as material, are 
but parts and elements of it, illustrating and adorning its 
different modes. Everywhere, since the first morning, has 
youth been incessantly bursting forth, and creation begin- 
ning afresh. " The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks 
as it did a thousand years ago ; the morning hymn of Mil- 
ton does but tell the beauty with which our own familiar 
sun dressed the earliest fields and gardens of the world ;" all 
things, says the apostle, " continue as they were from the 
beginning of creation." True, there is continual dismem- 
berment and disintegration ; the flower fades, the animal 
falls to dust, but this is not death — it is merely the casting 
away of worn-out vestures, in order that the new may be put 
on. The form, the idea, the actuality, lives forever; the 



* Literally " Keturn to a state of youth." 
344 



DEATH NOT THE DESTROYER OF LIFE. 345 

end always reverts to the beginning ; from the plant comes 
the fruit, and from the fruit comes the seed, which again 
contains the plant within itself. Look at that sculptured 
pine-apple ! Nature in miniature ; upon its yellow ripeness 
ensues a beautifril tufted crown of leaves, promising and be- 
ginning the whole history over again, the true Phoenix of 
creation.* The fabled Palm is only a metaphor of the 
world. Turn which way we will, we find no " killing prin- 
ciple" in nature, only a vitalizing and sustaining one. 
Throughout its whole extent, Nature is Life ; in all its 
forms and modifications, one vast and infinite Life — sub- 
ject, no doubt, to the extinction of particular presentations, 
but never to absolute and total death, even in its least and 
weakest things. Anything that looks like death is a token 
and certificate of life being about to start anew and invigo- 
rated. Every end is also a beginning. "All things in the 
world," says Lynch, " are striving to begin as well as to 
finish." Marriage once more is the type and exponent. So 
far, therefore, from being the destroyer of life, death, rightly 
viewed, is its nourisher and aliment. A thing does not pe- 
rish in order that it may no longer exist, but that another 
of the same or similar kind may enter fresh and beautiful 
upon the scene, and thus virtually perpetuate the original. 
"All death in nature," says Fichte, " is life, and in death 
appears visibly the advancement of life. It is not death 
which kills, but the higher life which, concealed behind the 
other, begins to develop itself. Death and birth are but 
the struggle of life with itself to attain a higher form.f 



* The same beautiful onward growth appears conspicuously in 
several of the New Holland genera of Myrtacese, as Melaleuca, Me- 
trosideros, Beaufortia, &c. ; and a similar phenomenon in the cones of 
the Larch, from the apex of which occasionally extends a leafy shoot. 

f Destination of Man, p. 127. 

P* 



346 EVERYTHING ALIVE TO THE LIVING MIND. 

Granted, we do not perceive it to be so if we look at things 
merely with the outward senses — we perceive it in the de- 
gree that our own minds are alive, and apt, from culture 
and sincere and fervent aspiration after truth, to rejuvenize 
in themselves. Everything is aHve to the living mind. 
Death is abundant in proportion as the mind is dead. To 
estimate our intellectual vitality, at any given time, we have 
but to ask ourselves. How much life are we conscious of? 
We speak, in ordinary converse, of youth and age as distinct 
epochs, and as a matter of appearance, correctly so. It re- 
sults, however, from this great law, that so far from being 
separate and successive, they are cotemporaneous and con- 
current. Youth does not cease, and age begin. Through- 
out life their phenomena run side by side, revolving each 
upon the other, age succeeding youth, youth succeeding age, 
in the most varied conditions of exchange, and often crowd- 
ing into the same region. Everywhere in nature we see youth 
and senility intermingled, presenting themselves alternately, 
and altogether irrespective and independent of annual birth- 
days. If decay attend upon age, so does it upon infancy ; 
if youth is a beginning, so, too is maturity. Life rising out 
of death was the great " mystery" which in old time, sym- 
bolism delighted to represent under the thousand ingenious 
forms preserved in mythology and ancient poetry, as in the 
lovely fable of Cupid and Psyche. Nature was explored in 
her every realm for attestations to it, the results giving to 
religion new sanctity and illustration, to philosophy new 
dignity and grace. Sleep was beautiftilly called " the minor 
mystery of death;" since the seeming suspension of life 
during the stillness of slumber, is the pathway to restoration 
of its powers, and thus a prefigurement of what death is de- 
signed for. " Death, like sleep," says the illustrious Herder, 
'■' cools the fever of life ; gently interrupts its too uniform 
and long-continued movement ; heals many wounds iucura- 



DEATH AN OPERATION OF LIFE. 347 

ble before, and prepares the soul for a pleasurable awaken- 
ing, for the enjoyment of a new morning of youth. As ia 
my dreams, my thoughts fly back to youth — as in my 
dreams, being only half fettered by the bodily organs, and 
more concentred in myself, I feel more free and active — so 
thou, revivifying dream of death, wilt smilingly bring back 
the youth of my life, the most energetic and pleasing mo- 
'ments of my existence."* 

199. When, then, it is said that death takes things away, 
it is said wrongfully. It is done by Life, the constant aim 
of which is to obtain a point of departure for renewed pro- 
gress, pushing out of the way whatever may obstruct. See 
what curious and striking illustrations are furnished in the 
physiology of our own bodies ! The teeth of the child drop 
from its little gums, that the teeth of manhood may take 
their place ; the blood, by its particles, supersedes itself as 
fast as it is formed ; every molecule of muscle, and bone, 
and brain, is an ephemeron ; our entire fabric is taken to 
pieces and rebuilt some seven or eight times before we leave 
it. The bodies of all other animals similarly rejuvenize 
during the period between birth and dissolution, some, in 
addition to the molecular renewal, having periodical and 
most curious replacements of entire organs. Birds renew 
their plumage; lizards and snakes their skins; the crab 
even replaces its stomach, forming a new one every year, 
and casting away the old. Plants also rejuvenize, exempli- 
fied in the annual renewal of their leaves and flowers. In 
the higher kinds of vegetation the phenomena are at once 
so marked and intelligible, as to have called forth the first, 
and as yet the only treatise, expressly devoted to this mag- 



* Outlines of a History of the Philosophy of Man, book 
chap. 4. 



348 PHYSIOLOGICAL EEJUVENESCENCE. 

nificent science.* Philo beautifully uses them to illustrate 
the " unbounded wisdom of God :" " The wealth of that 
wisdom is as a tree, which is continually putting forth new 
shoots after the old ones, so that it never ceases growing 
young again, and being in the flower of its strength." 

200. As a phenomenon of physiological or organic life, 
Eejuvenescence appears under two great general modes, 
namely, first. Return by the individual, either as a whole, 
or in its molecules, to an earlier condition of existence, 
securing thereby a point of departure for renewed progress ; 
secondly. Repetition in a new being, under the law of pro- 
creation by male and female, of the entire course of organic 
evolution. The first has for its object, the completion of the 
form ; the second has for its object, the repetition of the 
form. Rejuvenescence in order to Completion is exempli- 
fied in the growth of a child, leading it on to puberty, and 
thence to manhood ; that which has Repetition for its end, 
appears in the phenomena of generation and birth. It 
follows that it is the power of Rejuvenescence which mainly 
distinguishes organic bodies from inorganic, since in the 
latter there is neither a graduated development of the indi- 
vidual, nor renewal by procreation. Without rejuvenescence 
there can be no organic development, nor where organs are 
absent can rejuvenescence ever occur. The distinction be- 
tween the two kingdoms of organized beings themselves as 
regards rejuvenescence, is that while in animals there is a 
perpetual dissolution and rebuilding of the entire substance, 
the devitalized atoms being ejected, plants never rejuvenize 



* The Phenomenon of Eejuvenescence in Nature, especially in 
the life and development of Plants. From the German of Dr. A. 
Braun, by Arthur Henfrey. Kay Society's Volume, 1853. One of 
the most important of modern contributions to the philosophy of 
Botany. 



SLEEP. 349 

a part once completed, but provide for the stability and 
regularity of the vital processes, by developing new parts. 
The stem once formed and consolidated, never alters in the 
least; the leaves and flowers when done with, are disen- 
gaged, and absolutely new ones unfolded in their place. 

201. Rejuvenescence in order to the Completion of the 
form, has, accordingly, for its chief process in Animals, the 
decay and renewal of the tissues ; in Plants, the unfolding 
of new organs. Both involve a variety of minor and con- 
tributive activities, but most especially is this the case in 
the rejuvenescence of the animal, where the full effectuation 
of the molecular renewal requires and is secured by the 
grand supplementary process of Sleep — in effect a periodical 
return of the animal to its ante-natal state, beautifully cor- 
responding with the resumption of that state in lactation, 
which is a living over again of the life of the womb, on a 
higher plane. During sleep, the inner formative processes 
by which the body is preserved act undisturbedly and con- 
centratedly. Every one knows how sweet is the restoration 
derived from one's pillow when in health ; more wonderful 
even yet is that which we derive ivhen sleep occurs at the 
crisis of severe diseases. The nocturnal refreshment of the 
physical frame induces a similar restoration of the spiritual. 
Relaxed from the tension in which it is held towards the 
outer world while awake, during sleep the mind sinks into a 
condition comparable to that in which it lay before con- 
sciousness commenced ; all images and shapes it is cognizant 
of by day, either vanish, or appear only as reflected pic- 
tures ; unexcited from without, it " gathers itself up into 
new force, new comprehension of its purpose, much that 
crossed the waking thoughts, scattered and entangled, be- 
coming thereby sifted and arranged." Hence is it that " our 
waking thoughts are often our truest and finest; and that 
dreams are sometimes eminent and wise ; phenomena incom- 

30 



350 TRUE IDEA OP SPRING. 

patible with the idea that we die down like grass into our 
organic roots at night, and are merely resuscitated as from 
a winter when we wake. Man is captured in sleep, not by 
death, but by his better nature ; to-day runs in through a 
deeper day to become the parent of to-morrow, and he issues 
every morning, bright as the morning and of life size, from 
the peaceful womb of the cerebellum." The most remark- 
able illustration of the bearing of sleep upon rejuvenescence 
is supplied perhaps in the chrysalis period of Insect-life. 
Here takes place that grand retreat and gathering-in of 
vital power which enables the unsightly grub to expand 
into the lovely, completed and expressive form we call the 
Butterfly, so exquisite a symbol of the Spring, when winter, 
the grub and chrysalis era of the vegetable world, is emerged 
from and superseded. The analogy is important to consider, 
because of the common but mistaken impression that the 
charming green exuberance of the vernal season is no more 
than the work of the few days during which it appears. 
That beautiful display is in preparation all the winter, just 
as the butterfly is in preparation in the grub and chrysalis ; 
Spring merely brings the concluding steps before our eyes, 
as the rupture of the chrysalis the painted wings of the 
perfect insect. Not a little of the Spring begins in the pre- 
vious autumn, and even in the j)revious summer. The 
rudiments of the future leaves of the alder may be found 
in August; the leaves and even the flower-buds also of the 
lilac ; the catkins of the hazel make their appearance with 
the asters and golden-rod ; in the bulbs of the hyacinth, the 
tulip, and the crocus, long before they manifest the least 
sign of vegetation, the future blossom may readily be dis- 
cerned. Insect-life, as a whole, is the most perfect example 
we possess of Rejuvenescence having for its aim the Com- 
pletion of the Individual. The true idea of what is so 
improperly called the " metamorphosis" or " transformation" 



METAMORPHOSIS OF INSECTS. 351 

of insects, is development into a perfect state. It is no change 
of one creature into another. The caterpillar contains 
within itself the rudiments of the future butterfly in all its 
parts ; it becomes the butterfly — not, as commonly supposed, 
by a monstrous and supernatural mutation — simply by cast- 
ing its skin, and unfolding parts previously concealed and 
immature, first the limbs, by and by the wings, opening 
more and more, till the idea of the perfect insect is attained. 
No less striking and beautiful than the analogy of the But- 
terfly with the opening leaves and flowers of spring, is the 
rejuvenescence at that season of the Birds. They blossom 
in the Spring, like the trees and plants, glossy and tinted in 
their plumage, and like the plants again when they shed 
their petals, lose their peculiar spring and summer lustre 
immediately the process of hatching is completed. To 
return, however, to the Butterfly. We have a lesson in the 
insect's history of another kind. From time immemorial 
the butterfly has been the emblem of the resurrection. 
Anciently, as with the Egyptians, we find it drawn either in 
its proper form, or as a' lovely female child with butterfly's 
wings. " Employed, subsequently, by the Fathers of the 
Church, the beautiful symbol shone on their ponderous 
pages like a beam of sunlight falling through a painted 
window on the gloom of a cloister." The beauty and truth- 
fulness of the emblem lie, however, in exactly the opposite 
direction to that ordinarily supposed. Not only is the usual 
idea of the resurrection, or that of a decayed body recom- 
posed in its elements, and reunited after a certain interval 
to the soul, not represented in the natural history of the 
insect, but altogether contrary to it. What the history does 
teach is that which is also the true idea of the resurrection. 
As the caterpillar becomes the butterfly by no supernatural 
transformation, but simply by the casting away of outward 
coverings ; so does man become an angel, not by any imagi- 



352 THE FOUNTAIN OF REJUVENESCENCE. 

nary transmogrification of his " natural" body into a " spir- 
itual" body, but by the latter, which he always has, laying 
down and departing from the former, expanding its matured 
organs, and ascending into that higher and lovelier mode of 
life which is poetically represented under the name of wings. 
Only with such an understanding, does the name (poyji 
properly apply to the beautiful creature it denotes. Reau- 
mur, that great and good naturalist, when he discovered the 
real structure of the caterpillar, and pointed out the dis- 
crepancy between the truth of nature and the dogma of the 
preachers, was denounced as an enemy to revelation. 

202. Occasionally, but rarely, there is in man a resump- 
tion, when old, of the external signs of youth. Cherished 
from the remotest ages, the idea of a restoration of youthful 
health, and strength, and bodily shape, by some beautiful 
stroke of magic, is not altogether remote from fact, though 
the magic is in nature rather than Art. The basis, proba- 
bly, of the story of Medea and ^Eson ; it figures in the fables 
and national poetry of every period of the world; its most 
beautiful embodiment, the Fountain of Rejuvenescence, is 
found in the tales of the far East, in the romances of Chi- 
valry, and in the Mysteries : in the middle ages it was the 
symbol of Christianity renewing the moral strength of the 
world after the corruptions of pagan Rome; and now we 
have it in a fine picture by one of the best of the French 
pre-Raphaelite school.* The Alchemists thought to secure 
such rejuvenescence by the aid of the Philosopher's Stone, 
which was not only to ward oflT sickness and infirmities, but 
to replace men in the vigor of early youth. Vincent de 
Beauvais attempted to show that Noah's having children 



* M. Haiissouiller, " La Fontaine de Jouvence." See the engrav- 
ing in the " Illustrated London News," September 20th, 1856. 



REPRODUCTION, 353 

when five hundred years old was owing to his possession of 
this precious secret, whereby he had had restored to him the 
freshness of his ancient puberty. Vain expectation ! though 
man may certainly please himself with the reflection that 
he alone ever steps in the grateful path. The lower animals 
begin to decay almost immediately after the decline of their 
propagative power; in man, life is prolonged more or less 
after virility has ceased, and now and then operates over 
again some of the most characteristic phenomena of his ear- 
liest days. The cutting of new teeth in old age; return of 
the power of suckling ; growth of hair similar to that of the 
young, and several other such phenomena are abundantly 
on record, as may be seen at one view in Dr. Mehliss, whose 
curious work, Ueber Viriliseens und JRejuvenescenz thierischer 
Korper (Leipsic, 1838), has raised the matter into a branch 
of physiology. Of new dentition, for example, he cites not 
less than thirty or forty authentic instances, many of them 
octogenarian. For the appearance of these phenomena it is 
necessary, he tells us, that there should exist complete 
energy and integrity of vegetative life, and probably also 
local excitement. 

203. The second great form of physiological Rejuvenes- 
cence, or that by which man, and all other living creatures, 
together with plants, renew themselves as to race, is ex- 
pressed in the phenomena of procreation. 

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, 
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; 
So generations in their course decay, 
So flourish these, when those are passed away. 

Here it is that we most clearly understand that death, so 
called, is the operation of Life. The particular aggrega- 
tions of material elements, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so 
forth, drawn together and consolidated by the immortal idea 



354 PROCREATION. 

of each plant and animal, and by the spiritual body in man, 
break up and disappear after awhile; but the Form remains 
with us still ; its old apparel only parted with, in order that 
new may be put on. Wonderful as are the processes of 
sustentation and repair in the individual, those of procrea- 
tion, or the sustentation of the species, incomparably trans- 
cend them. No trifling work is the elaboration of a body 
which shall feed and grow, move and exchange offices of 
friendship; but to construct one which, in addition to all 
this, shall be able to engender new beings like itself, is the 
very acme of skill and miracle. So excellently has the sub- 
ject been dealt with by other hands, so extensive also is its 
detail, that here we need only advert to it as one of the most 
solemn considerations of life, a subject never to be approached 
without reverence and awe. The unthinking part of man- 
kind look upon procreation as no more than one of the com- 
mon impulses of nature, and consider the slightest allusion 
to it improper. Many even of those who ought to know 
better, regard it as ignoble and degrading, and its alluring 
incidents only as palliative and reconciliatory. There can- 
not be a lower idea. In the whole range of delegated offices 
there is none more honorable and noble than to act for the 
Father of all, as perpetuator of the objects he has created 
"for his pleasui^e;" wherefore also the depth and fearfulness 
of its responsibility, since of all situations a man can place 
himself in, that of Father is the most serious and manifold 
in duties. Large indeed should be the faith in heavenly 
succor of him who adventures upon progeny. The same is 
the ground of the brilliant delights which enter into its his- 
tory, since outward circumstance is always made commen- 
surate with the dignity of that which it accompanies and 
invests. The Beauty which attends on the period when 
with the complete evolution of the system, the power is 
attained of reproducing the species, is one of the most admi- 



BEAUTY AND THE NUPTIAL SEASON, 355 

rable phenomena of nature. The principle is universally 
set forth. See how the plant, at its nuptial hour, adorns 
itself with bright flowers ! See how the glow-worm trims its 
lamp; how the butterfly spreads its gallant pinions! In 
fishes, birds and mammals, jDuberty is again characterized 
universally by the development of ornaments more or less 
striking, such as brightly-colored scales and plumage, horns, 
manes, and beards, the last-named enhancing the manly 
beauty attained at this period in our own species, the female 
of which is even more largely embellished by the growth of 
the hair, and the development of the mammae, and of the 
subcutaneous tissues of the body in general, giving to the 
limbs their matchless "lily roundness." Not only are beauty 
of form and color now most exquisite. Flowers smell the 
sweetest during the union of the sperm-cell with the germ- 
cell, especially in its central moments, losing their fragrance 
rapidly when it is completed; in the animal kingdom, dur- 
ing the same period, sounds are emitted, pleasing, undoubt- 
edly, to the ears they are designed for, and taking in man, 
the form of poetry and music. The ballad " to his mistress' 
eyebrow" of the lover is the exact analogue of the song of 
the bird, and the chirp of the grasshopper and cicada.* 
That the song of birds has immediate reference to their loves, 
is generally understood. Like the beauty of their plumage, 
it rises to its highest degree during the pairing season, and 
is lost at the time of moulting. All our resident birds that 
renew their song in the autumn, probably have broods at 
that time; the thrush, and the blackbird, which are heard 
from the middle of January to October, generally have two 
broods in the course of the season, and not infrequently 



* Abridged, in part, from Dr. Laycock. British and Foreign 
Medico-Cliirurgical Keview, July, 1855. 



356 REPRODUCTION AN EMBLEM OF ETERNITY. 

three. But it is not merely a pairing cry, being continued 
till the young birds break the shell, and in many cases till 
they are able to fly. Probably it produces general excite- 
ment in the female bird, while sitting, so as to increase the 
needful warmth, and a power of more energetic performance 
by both parents of the various duties of the nest. We all 
know that there are sounds, especially from those we love, 
which make the heart beat, and the bosom thrill, and the 
whole body glow, inspiring us magically and beautifully, 
and doubtless it is the same with the feathered dwellers in 
the trees. 

204. Holding this sublime power of self-renewal as a part 
of its very nature, every animal, bird and insect, every tree 
and herb, down to the humblest moss, is in its procreant ca- 
pacity an emblem and prefigurement of Eternity. Forever 
rolling onwards, the truest and grandest idea of the Divine 
life is unfolded to us in the phenomena of reproduction. 
Hence that beautiful custom of the ancients, of placing 
seeds in the hands of the dead, and in their tombs and sar- 
cophagi. They perceived that the renovation of a plant, by 
its seeds, year by year, and from age to age, unchanged in 
the least of its essential characters, is a picture in little of 
immortality. The rites of religion always have reference to 
the theory ; wherever religion has existed, the offices of the 
living to the dead have invariably formed a part of them ; 
and as all religious rites are of necessity symbolical, their 
beauty and intelligibleness show the quality of the faith 
which employs them. The custom alluded to thus testifies 
in itself to the antiquity of man's persuasion that he is to 
live forever.* With mankind, elevation to capacity for the 



* The early Christians also put seeds in the coffins of the dead, 
but in their case it was in acknowledgment of the imagery of St. 



THE POEM OF GEOLOGY. 357 

privileges and rewards of procreation is the effulgent Aurora 
of existence. Youth begins over again, on a higher and 
more beautiful plane ; whatever talents there may be in the 
soul, now they make their appearance. Early or late, 
whenever it may be first felt, love, the high-priest of procre- 
ation, always leads the way to reju.venescence of our entire 
nature; no pleasures are so sincere and so enduring as those 
which come late in life through renewal of one's youth un- 
der the sweet agency of a happily-placed affection, nor are 
any so thankfully enjoyed. 

205. The rejuvenescence which the entire organic garment 
of the earth has undergone, and will not improbably un- 
dergo again, is the poem of Geology. This rejuvenescence 
consists in the development of successive suites of animals 
and plants ; enduring, as to their species, for incalculable 
ages, and then disappearing, or nearly so, to make way for 
newer and higher kinds, to endure for as long, and in turn 
be themselves superseded. Four times, at least, says Lyell, 
do these changes take place in the course of the tertiary era, 
and to an extent which leaves hardly a species of the first 
period extant among the species now living. This is not in- 
consistent with the previously noticed kinds of rejuvene- 
scence. It is rejuvenescence of organic nature in the mass, 
the particular genera and species being but subordinate in- 
cidents in the great onward and upward current of terrestrial 
Life. " Newer and higher kinds " is not to be understood as 
implying that the new appearances are all of higher grade. 
" Geology affords no ground whatever for the hypothesis of a 
regular succession of creatures, beginning with the simplest 
forms in the older strata, and ascending to more complicated 



Paul. See an interesting article on the subject in Hooker's "Com- 
panion to the Botanical Magazine," vol. 2, j). 298. 



358 PROGRESS A FACT OF NATURAL HISTORY. 

in the later formations. The earliest forms of life known to 
geology are not of the lowest grade of organization ; neither 
are the earliest forms of any of the classes which subsequently 
appear, the simplest of their kind." It is in the aggregate 
of forms, large and small, higher and lower, that the pro- 
gressive improvement is shown, and this is one of the 
proudest facts of natural history. It is proper to remark, 
however, that there is a difference in this respect, as regards 
plant and animal remains. While the vegetable kingdom 
has ahvays had representatives of highest as well as of low- 
est forms ; in the animal fossils of the earlier ages, there are, 
on the other hand, no vertebrates. But this difference, as 
Alphonse De Candolle remarks, " need not excite much as- 
tonishment, when we think of the vast distance which 
separates the inferior and the superior animals, and the 
comparatively homogeneous character of the great classes 
of vegetables." Neither does geology give any countenance 
to the idea of " progressive development," in the sense of 
transmutation of one species into another. We mention 
this because of the importance of distinguishing the idea in 
question from that of gradual improvement as a character- 
istic of successive creations. It is a very different thing for 
an organism to improve into one of higher nature, by eleva- 
tion of its own qualities and powers, and for that organism 
to cease altogether, and be replaced by a superior one. The 
changes in the plants and animals of our earth, as regards 
its successive periods, have uniformly been wrought in the 
latter way. The evidence of it is plain and abundant; 
whereas there is none whatever to support the hypothesis of 
the superiority having resulted from change for the better 
of earlier individuals. That such improvement in the suc- 
cessive sets of organized beings has been made, and is visible 
to us, is a strong proof of the existence and the activity of 
God; "improvement" of course being understood, when 



FLOWERINa PLANTS AND HUMANITY. 359 

predicated of the Divine work, not as a coming forth of 
results of experience in creating, but simply as a term de- 
noting that Divine wisdom saw fit to disclose less elabo- 
rate forms in the first place, and more elaborate ones 
subsequently. The halting of nature at given periods in 
the world's history, and in the intervals between one set of 
species and another, producing (as at present) only the like, 
is but the same phenomenon, on a grand scale, as that of 
the repetition of its leaves by a plant, perhaps hundreds of 
times, before the development advances to the stage of flow- 
ers. Looking at the world as a grand scene of organic evo- 
lution, every new step in its rejuvenescence bringing it nearer 
and nearer towards completion, we cannot but recognize how 
beautiful an image of it, in little, is presented in a youthful 
Tree, with its successive sets of leaves, more and more per- 
fect and abundant in each new unfolding (so well shown, 
for example, in young sycamores), the last and fairest era 
being, in the one case, Man and the magnificent nature co- 
temporary with him ; in the other. Blossoms and Fruit. 
Blossoms and humanity are ideas which invariably go to- 
gether ; the pre-Adamite plants were almost without excep- 
tion flowerless ; fossil bees do not occur till the period of the 
earth's preparation as a home for human beings. " The 
first bee," says the late talented and lamented author of The 
Testimony of the Rocks, " makes its appearance in the am- 
ber of the Eocene, locked up hermetically in its gem-like 
tomb — an embalmed corpse in a crystal coffin — along with 
fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees. The first of 
the Bombycidse too — insects that may be seen suspended 
over flowers by the scarcely visible vibrations of their wings, 
and sucking the honied juices by means of their long slen- 
der trunks — also appear in the amber, associated with 
moths, butterflies, and a few caterpillars. Bees and butter- 
flies are present in increased proportions in the latter terti- 



8(30 THE EOSACEiE. 

ary deposits; but not until that terminal creation to which 
we ourselves belong was ushered on the scene, did they re- 
ceive their fullest development." Examining the curious 
and beautiful relics to which Miller alludes, how striking 
appears the contrast between the tombs of these ancient and 
inconsiderable insects and those which the dead receive at 
our own hands ! Instead of the gloom which surrounds the 
last habitations of mankind, here is brightness ; instead of 
being loathsome and painful to look upon, here is something 
to admire and covet. How insignificant and bungling seem 
the best efibrts of Art to embalm and preserve the corpse of 
a departed friend, compared with this simple and elegant 
method of Nature, so profound and perfect even in what 
may appear most fanciful and trifling in her works ! 

206. Not only were the species new, in the successive re- 
juvenizings of the earth's surface, but in many instances, 
the entire families. Rosaceous plants, for example, do not 
belong to the earlier periods of the world's history. Hence 
may we infer the higher nature of their correspondence in 
regard to the spiritual principles of which they are out- 
births and representatives, a presumption already afforded 
in the apple — a leading member of this tribe — being the 
most perfect realization of a fruit, whether regarded as to 
its botanical structure, or its uses. In the same generous 
family are comprised the almond, the strawberry, and the 
medlar; the plum, the peach, the nectarine, the apricot, 
"shining in sweet brightness of golden velvet," together 
with innumerable charming flowers, every one of them, 
without doubt, of a fine spiritual origin and significance. 
That these plants were not placed upon the earth until the 
period of its occuj)ancy by man, because he alone could es- 
teem their produce, and that they were specially destined 
for human nourishment and satisfaction, may certainly be 
assumed as the reason of their late bestowal. Doubtless, 



THE FEENS. 361 

there is an exact relation between the races of animals and 
plants, and the epochs at which they have been placed upon 
the earth ; since the whole matter of the succession of organ- 
ized beings is the realization of an infinitely wise plan — 
whence, also, the impossibility of attaining grand and accu- 
rate ideas of nature without the aid of geology ; — the pro- 
founder reason lies, however, m the correspondence of nature 
and the soul, the order in which, of growth and effiorescence, 
is in every point the same. Quite unlike the Rosacese are 
the Ferns. In these, so far from a comparatively recent 
femily, we have the inheritors of one of the most ancient and 
noble titles in vegetable peerage. Glorious in all periods of 
the world's history, while the leaves and branches of its gene- 
alogical tree are green and vigorous with rills of current life, 
its roots strike deep into the remotest records of the past. 
Honorable in the olden time, beautiful to-day, the Ferns are 
the beau-ideal of a patrician family. Their value is com- 
mensurate with their charms. Like the Rosetta stone, they 
speak at once a familiar language and a primaeval, helping 
thereby to interpret the vast and sacred mysteries of extin- 
guished ages. Less interesting, only because exotices of 
small numbers and variety, are those other curious relics of 
antiquity, the Cycadese. Memorials of a class of plants 
whose day is past, they seem to linger with us not so much 
for themselves as to " make former times shake hands with 
latter." 

207. Let us pass on to the renewals that pertain to the 
Spiritual degree of life. In the changes of our feelings we 
have rejuvenescences quite as beautiful as those of nature. 
The decay and retrogression which we see in autumn among 
the plants, providing the means of a charming palingenesis 
in the spring, is not more regular and universal than are the 
declensions we are subject to in ourselves ; nor does nature 
rebound more freely and improved. Whenever there is a 
31 Q 



362 PLEASURES OF LITERARY OLD AGE. 

return of the heart from unsatisfying, selfish, or ignoble pur- 
suits, to a taste for the j)ure and uncloying charms of virtue 
and nature, there we have the restoration of our youth; 
wherever there is advance into new and delicious fields of 
thought and feeling, under the influence of new scenes, or 
the advent of new friends, or the passing away of what is 
painful, or distasteful, life starts anew in all its plenitude of 
powers and sentiment. How charmingly does D'Israeli 
describe the rejuvenescence in old age, of well-cultivated 
literary taste! "The steps of time are retraced, and we 
resume the possessions we seemed to have lost. We open 
the poets who made us enthusiasts, and the philosophers 
who taught us to think, with a new source of feeling acquired 
by our own experience. Adam Smith confessed his satisfac- 
tion at this pleasure to Dugald Stewart, while reper using 
with the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic poets of ancient 
Greece. The calm, philosophic Hume found death only 
could interrupt the keen pleasure he was again receiving 
from Lucian. 'Happily,' said this philosopher, 'on retir- 
ing from the world, I found my taste for reading return 
with even greater avidity.' Lord Woodhouselee found the 
composing anew his Lectures on History so fascinating in 
the last period of his life, that it rewarded him, Alison in- 
forms us, with ' that peculiar delight which has been often 
observed in the later years of literary men, the delight of 
returning to the studies of their youth, and of feeling under 
the snows of age the cheerful memories of their Spring.' In 
the solitude and night of human life, is discovered that un- 
regarded kindness of nature which has given flowers that 
only open in the evening, and bloom through the night 
season."* As morning and sunshine come back in the Hes- 



* "The Literary Character," chap. xx. See also an original and 
beautiful "Account of the state of the body and mind in old age," in 



NEW DOCTRINES AND OLD, 363 

peris, the evening primrose, and the night-flowering cereus, 
so do fancy and imagination rejuvenize with the man of 
taste.* 

208. There is abundant illustration of this great law also 
in civil, scientific, and literary history, especially the last; 
and it is worthy of observation that the precursor of a new 
era is always one who refuses to follow the slavishness, ex- 
travagances, and caprices of exhausted invention, and 
returns to the freedom, simplicity, and integrity of nature. 
This is why men of true genius, who illumine the world with 
something new and glorious, are always accused of "violat- 
ing the rules," i. e., refusing to dwell among the tombs. 
What shallow-minded bigots call "heresy" and "hetero- 
doxy" is often nothing more than the rejuvenescence of a 
devout and healthy soul, too far elevated above themselves 
ever to care for their censure and wrath. The great Syden- 
ham, with whom the science of medicine rejuvenized, as it 
did with Harvey and Hunter, was conspired against with 
intent to expel him from his College, as "guilty of medical 
heresy." Death, in its blindness, always thinks that its con- 
trary, or Life, is the dead condition ; as evil always pities 
the good, and would fain persuade us that itself is the swn- 



tlie Medical Inquiries and Observfltions of that most interesting 
writer, Dr. Kusli. Volume 2. (Philadelphia, 1793.) 

* The number and variety of the flowers which expand, or only 
become fragrant towards evening, show how deeply seated is this 
beautiful correspondence. Besides the familiar species above men- 
tioned, there are the Marvel of Peru, the tuberose, several species 
of the Germanicese, as Pelargonium triste; several of the Caryo- 
phyllese, as Silene noctiflora and vespertina, and Dianthus pomeri- 
danus ; many tropical Convolvulacese, as Ipomsea bona-nox ; additional 
Cruciferse, as Cheiranthus sinuatus ; together with various Orchidepe, 
Malvaceae, and ThymelcEe. Bartonia ornata, and Barringtonia spe- 
ciosa are also beautiful congeners. 



364 EEVIVALS. 

mum honum. When another kind of rejuvenescence Avas 
transpiring under the genius of Lord Bacon, Sir Thomas 
Bodley wrote to him remonstrating on his "new mode of 
philosophizing." New doctrines always displease the small 
and stagnant-souled, who may be knoAvn by their having 
nailed themselves to given opinions, and considering novel- 
ties vicious and illegal. Given to fancying that the world 
has been losing wisdom instead of gaining it, since the pe- 
riod when they contracted their views, they must work by 
precedent, or not at all, and hence are never anything but 
mimics. Not so the men of life and power. "The great 
men never know how or why they do things. They have 
no rules, cannot comprehend the nature of rules. The mo- 
ment any man begins to talk about rules, in whatsoever art, 
you may know him for a second-rate man; and if he talk 
much about them, he is a third-rate." As Goethe said, all 
great men produce their works as women do pretty children, 
without either thinking about it, or knowing how it is done. 
All great epochs are epochs of resurrection. Not one of our 
modern institutions is purely an establishment of To-day. 
That which is, has already been, only under another and 
cruder form. The mode may be different, but the principle 
is the same; the truths Ave delight in as our own, were plea- 
sures to our forefathers; if Ave do not recognize them in our 
readings in history, it is because the ages in their sjDiral rise 
have lifted them to a higher level, as a building becomes 
different when Ave are close beside it, from Avhat it appears 
while in the distance. Ideas never die. Out of fashion for 
awhile; lost, perhaps, for generations, they bide their time, 
then revive, as Ovid says, in nova corpora mutata, "changed 
into new bodies." No, fragment of truth has ever been 
really lost. Immortal as its origin, every particle is sure to 
rise again, its resurrection the result of its immortality. All 
the great "Revivals" of the present age partake of this 



THE GOLDEN AGE. 365 

character, and result from this mighty law. Let us be 
careful then how we ridicule even the least of them. Resus- 
citations can only happen where there is life ; the absurdity 
may prove to be in ourselves, rather than in the things. 
What the many are, such is the individual. The parallel 
between the soul of man and that of society is exact. 
"Every man," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is not only him- 
self; there have been many Diogeneses, and many Timons, 
though but few of the name; men are lived over again; the 
world is now as it was in ages past ; there was none then, 
but there has been some one since that parallels him, and is, 
as it were, his revived self" We often cast our eyes towards 
the future. If we would speculate on it rightly, we must 
first comprehend the present, and that is best done by con- 
templating the 2^cist. True, in our retrospect we seem to see 
little more than Destruction ; but in the eyes of the natu- 
ralist this indicates Renewal, transition into a new, up- 
growing Time. Not a few of our greatest riddles have their 
solutions in ancient history; yea, even in the fables of my- 
thology; for mythology is not, as foolish people fancy, pro- 
fane romance, and nothing more, but sound and living 
prophecy, a sort of secular inspiration suited to the times to 
which it was given, and intended to receive fulfillment in 
later days. We talk of the golden age as gone. Not so ; 
the golden age is both with us, and to come. 

209. The highest rejuvenescence of all is man's return to 
youth in heaven. Some people think, weakly, that " death 
is the only reality in life ; happier and rightlier-minded are 
those who see and feel that Life is the true reality in death." 
Why, then, call it death ? and why mourn and weep for 
those who return to the spring-time of existence? Why 
complain that we ourselves seem to be so soon taken from 
this land of tombs, and replaced in the golden country of 
our pristine hopes and imaginings ? 

81 ® 



CHAPTER XXI. 

mSAT.TH AKl) DISEASE— MATIONAT.IS OF MIHACT^ES. 

210. Intimately allied with the idea of Rejuvenescence, 
is that of Health, the synonyme of Life, the delicious 
spring of all animal enjoyment, and the finest light whereby 
both to think and to love. Without health, the larger part 
of our time is at once wretched and unjorofitable. Sickness, 
which, in its intenser degree, is disease, turns existence from 
a blessing into misery ; it makes us " go mourning all the 
day long," and if not checked in its inroads, soon ends in 
the death which it foretells. " The excellences of the body," 
says old Charron, " are health, beauty, sjDrightliness, agility, 
vigor, dexterity, gracefulness in motion and behaviour. 
But Health is infinitely before all. Health is the love- 
liest, the most desirable, the richest present in the power of 
nature to confer. One thing only is more valuable, and 
that is Probity." Vigorous health is the chief secret of 
Good Temper. Fretfulness, petulance, irritability, come 
oftener of bodily ailments than of natural unloveliness of 
disposition, as proved by the change which supervenes with 
relief. No one of any considerateness will ever deal harshly 
where such states of feeling are developed from such a 
cause, though none are more likely to be betrayed into im- 
patience with them than the heai-ty and robust, who having 
no experience of the aggravations of physical pain, deem 
that moral offences can have no other than a moral origin. 
As with the individual, so with Communities. Study the 

366 



MENTAL DISEASE. 367 

temper of the people who live in marshy districts, of those 
who encounter an annual tropical fever, or who are subject 
to goitre, and contrast them with the dispositions of the 
dwellers on mountains, and in dry prairies ; what selfishness, 
apathy, and discontent we find in the former class ; what 
kindliness, cheerfulness, and hospitality in the other ! A 
curious parallel might be instituted between Health and 
Money. Health is the less envied, but the more largely 
and thoroughly enjoyed ; money is exactly the reverse, or a 
thousand times less enjoyed than it is envied. The superi- 
ority of Health becomes evident, nevertheless, when we 
reflect that the poorest man would not part with his health 
for money, whereas the invalided rich would Avillingly buy 
health. 

211. True of the body, all this is even more true of the 
soul, which has likewise its health and its ailments ; and in 
no less intimate connection with its vitality, and happiness, 
and death. Far more emphatically does the ancient pro- 
verb apply to the soul than to the body — 

Non est vivere, sed valere, vita. 

" Let no man deceive himself," say the incomparable Pe- 
trarch, " by thinking that the contagions of the soul are less 
than those of the body. They are yet greater ; they sink 
deeper, and creep on more unsuspectedly."* To talk either 
of life or health, whether of soul or of body, is thus vir- 
tually to talk of the other ; and the same of their negations, 
or death and disease. Spiritual disease is not to be con- 
founded, however, with " mental disease," or insanity, lunacy, 
idiotcy, dementia, &c., in their various kinds. Not one of 



* De Vita Solitaria, I. 3, iv., Opera, p. 233. One of the best 
portions of wliat Coleridge so well calls "the inestimable Latin 
writings of Petrarch." 



6bQ SPIRITUAL DISEASE. 

these conditions implies, necessarily, a diseased soul, seeing 
that they may and do most frequently come of mere disease 
of its material instrument, the brain. " Circumstances not 
only environ essentials, but alter their seemings. Brains 
may be born into inconvenient cases. Good human minds, 
veritable immortal children, may be born into idiot brains, 
which will represent them badly, as a poor gift of speech 
may choke the utterance of a rich heart."* Spiritual dis- 
ease is where the brain itself is healthy, but its owner and 
master distempered. Spiritually, we are well when we feel 
ourselves diligent in the pursuit of intelligence, and have 
" a conscience void of oifence toward God and man," when 
we are earnest to keejD God's law, and thence tranquil, and 
sensitive to whatever is beautiful ; we are sick when these 
conditions are absent or reversed. The correspondence of 
physical disease with spiritual is most exact. By reason of 
it we speak of a healthy tone of feeling, a morbid imagina- 
tion, sickly sentimentality, ill-nature, ill-temper; also of 
being sick at heart, ill at ease, cured of bad habits. Pru- 
dent, well-timed words, Homer calls bjiriz, healthy. (II. 
viii. 524.) From the Latin sanus and sanitas, we have the 
equivalent expressions, sanitary, sanatory, sanative, sane, 
insane, sanity, insanity; the three first applied to bodily, the 



^' In ascribing lunacy, insanity, &c. to diseased brain, we must take 
care not to do so unreservedly. Cases are not infrequently met with 
of patients who have been mad for years, and yet whose brains, on 
dissection after death, present no appearances different from those 
of persons who have died in all the vigor of sound intellect. On 
the other hand, all morbid appearances of the brain (except those 
which suj)ervene upon general paralysis) are found as frequently in 
persons who have died sane as in those who have died mad. The 
sudden cures of the mad, their temporary restorations, and rdany 
other facts lead to the belief that insanity may probably be a disease 
of the blood. 



ORIGIN OF DISEASE. 369 

others to intellectual health. Sound, which is the same word 
as sanus, is applied to a " sound judgment," as well as to a 
" sound constitution." 

212. It is because of the spiritual diseases that the physi- 
cal ones exist ; or rather, they are both of them outbirths 
of the same infernal cause, namely, the circumstances and 
principles of hell. Whatever is good, beautiful, and enjoy- 
able upon earth, is by derivation from heaven, or the bright 
and angelic portion of the spiritual world; whatever is evil, 
offensive, and ugly, comes, similarly, from the regions of 
dai'kness. Disease belongs to the dark catalogue. In its 
moral forms, it is directly inseminated and sustained by. evil 
spirits — the door to their agency being the "fallen nature" 
inherited from our parents and ancestors ; for, that man is 
exposed to the incessant, though secret and silent seductions 
of evil spirits, is no less certain than that he is blessed by 
the ministration of angels ; — its physical forms appear 
among us, because of the universal and immutable ordi- 
nance that all things and conditions spiritual, shall issue 
into material representatives. Proximately, these latter are 
induced by infraction of the laws of the physical world. 
Though all such afflictions are referable, ultimately, to the 
providence of God, it is no direct supernatural influence 
that casts a man into rheumatism or fever, but carelessness 
of something purely natural. This is the immediate cause 
of physical suffering ; else man would not be the free agent 
that he is, in matters of health and self-protection. Disease, 
accordingly, is no part of the projDer nature of things, as 
death is, but a declension from it. Disease destroys, but- 
death is sanative. Disease is to the mf^terial body what sin 
is to the soul ; a condition it is liable to, but so far as it is 
given to man to judge, apparently by no means inevitable. 
A distinction is clearly drawn in Scripture between those 
who " kept not their first estate," and those whom the sense 



370 COERUPTION OF NATURE BY THE FALL 

of the passage imjalies to have retained it. Decay is natural, 
because nature is finite, such decay always having reference 
to Rejuvenescence, or the renewal of life ; but disease — un- 
derstanding by this name, painful and virulent affections — 
is not natural. At least it is impossible to conceive of it as 
in any way compatible with a state of moral and physical 
purity, such as that which the Bible teaches regarding our 
first parents, and which alone is a true state of Nature. 
The hundred wretched maladies which noiu infest the world, 
entered it, there is every reason to believe, with man's gra- 
dual, and deeper and deeper lapse into sin, or the im-natural 
state. While the " corruption of nature by the Fall" is un- 
questionably much exaggerated by theologians, in whose 
commentaries it is far more largely dwelt upon than in the 
Scriptures — ^neither our Saviour nor any of the New Testa- 
ment writers who profited by his oral instruction ever 
making mention of it — it cannot for a moment be doubted 
that there is an awful and unrecalled literal truth in what 
it is customary to call the " curse." Thorns and thistles 
shall the earth produce unto thee, in sorrow shalt thou 
bring forth ; and the other similar intimations of evil to 
come, carry with them the intimation, though this is not 
specifically stated, that disease also would now begin to af- 
flict. It would enter the world, like the thorns and thistles 
themselves, and like the creatures which are noxious to 
man — expressly taught by Luther, Kirby, and many others 
to have been unknown to this earth till after the Fall ; — it 
would now enter the world because the latter had become 
an arena, through the sin of its inhabitants, into which in- 
fernal principles and circumstances could project them- 
selves; each thorn and thistle, and noxious animal and 
disease, being the physical embodiment or playing forth of 
some element of hell ; the virus of a long anterior sin, in- 
fusing itself into a fresh country of the universe. The com- 



PHYSICAL AND MORAL DISEASE. 371 

mon origin of the two forms of disease of course does not 
imply that they shall exist in the smne person, or that moral 
disease necessarily engenders physical, or physical disease, 
moral, in a man who suffers from the other. It is in the 
total of the world and its inhabitants — some experiencing 
the spiritual, others the physical, that the representative 
fulfillment is effected. Physical disease visits the most vir- 
tuous, if they neglect to take sanitary precautions ; and the 
man who attends to them, though he be a thief and a liar, 
probably has not a day's sickness in his life-time. Permitted 
thus to enter the Avorld we dwell in, like all other evils, it still 
comes under the supervision of divine love. To exhibit this 
great principle as regards sickness, has been the happy office 
of Dr. Duncan, in his commendable little work, " God in 
Disease, or the manifestations of design in morbid pheno- 
mena." " Throughout every dej)artment of the various 
forms of physical suffering," says he, " are scattered in pro- 
fusion, proofs of care, of tenderness, and of design." By 
well-chosen illustrations, embracing many different kinds of 
disease, the Doctor shows most conclusively, that though in- 
fernal in its origin, all the subsequent history of disease is a 
history of infinite benevolence, and this whether it aflflict 
the wicked or the good. This book is of peculiar value as 
being the first step in a very usefiil direction, namely, the 
collection of the evidence of a personal and merciful God in 
the disorders and irregularities of the universe. 

213. Connected thus intimately, it follows that the best 
and shortest way to diminish physical disease, is to strive to 
diminish that which is spiritual ; seeing that wherever there 
is most scope afforded for underlying spiritual forces to ex- 
press themselves, the physical outbirths of those forces will 
most abound. So long as mankind surrender themselves 
willingly to the malignant seductions of infernal spirits, 
thereby opening the way for- aggravation and extension of 



372 THE MIRACLES OF HEALING. 

spiritual disease, so long will physical disease continue in 
full force. The principle is daily becoming verified. Though 
the names, and thence the apparent diversities of disease, 
are multiplying, disease itself, with the advance of civiliza- 
tion, is steadily decreasing.* While knowledge is power, it 
is also bodily health. As arts and sciences, social economy 
and refinement, move onwards, all these things being essen- 
tially connected with moral or Christian advance, the means 
are increased by which life is defended, and pain alleviated. 
How much more, then, may be anticipated from the direct 
warfare with the very fundamental causes of disease carried 
on by the extension of religious principle and motive, in 
other words, from the gradual evangelization of the world. 
Intelligence assails disease proximately, because it teaches 
what are the physical laws of health, and the implicit obe- 
dience they require ; improvement in morals helps to subvert 
its very basis. To get a vicious man to amend his morals, 
is similar to burying a corpse. For as the latter difiuses 
malaria of physical death, so do the wicked among mankind 
diffuse those of spiritual death. Innocence and purity are 
corrupted by them; health is lost, and disease takes its 
place. 

214. The miracles performed by our Lord consisted chiefly 
in healing, for the very reason that bodily diseases represent 
the more awful ones of the soul, which it was the object of 
his life and death in the flesh to remove. "Jesus went about 
all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the 
gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness, 
and all manner of disease among the people." Every cure 
which he wrought represented the liberation of the soul from 
some particuhir kind of moral evil, or some specific intellec- 



* See Marx and Willis, On the Decrease of Disease effected by the 
Process of Civilization. 1844. 



THE TRUE INTENT OF MIRACLES. 373 

tual error. " Bless the Lord, O my soul," says the psalmist, 
" who. forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy dis- 
eases." Thus were the miracles in question performed not 
merely as indications of a Divine power to command, but 
as media of spiritual instruction. To the more intelligent 
Jews who witnessed them, they must have been peculiarly 
attractive, seeing that an especial function of their Scrip- 
tures — the Old Testament of our Bible — and of the entire 
ritual of their religion, had been to train them to look for 
lessons of spiritual wisdom in things physical and objective. 
Under this discipline, the love of signs and wonders became 
eminently characteristic of the Jewish mind, as a taste for 
philosophic speculation and discussion was peculiarly dis- 
tinctive of the Greek;* so that, from disposition as well as 
habit, they must have been prepared — or at least the pious 
and better part, who had eyes to see — ^to perceive in those 
acts of divine cure the benignest and most godlike of pro- 
mises. No man rightly appreciates the miracles who does 
not interpret them after the same manner. That such is the 
true and the j^r^saribed intent of the miracles, is shown by 
the very word used to denote them, which is almost uniformly 
(jTjiiuov, "sign," implying that they are to be regarded as 
significant, i. e., significant of something interior to and 
higher than the bare physical performance. The value of a 
thing is always in proportion to its significance, to the truth 
which it representatively teaches ; the spectacle of the world 
is the grand, permanent source of sound and sublime in- 
struction which we find it, entirely by virtue of this great 
quality; as the chief efiect of female beauty depends on ex- 
pression, so the value to our minds of the material universe 
comes of our being able to perceive in it the expressive cha- 



* "The Jews," says St. Paul, "requh-e a sign, and tlie Greeks seek 
after -wisdom." 1 Cor. i. 22. 
32 



374 PHILOSOPHY OF MIRACLES. 

racters of Divine intelligence and love. When, in daily 
converse, we would speak of a thing as utterly worthless, we 
say that it is wisignificant, it teaches nothing but what we 
see in its blank outline. 

215. Whatever may be the theological importance of 
these miracles, their value in helping us on towards a right 
philosophy of the universe, is at least equal to it. We are 
introduced by them, and indeed by the miracles universally, 
to new and more enlightened perceptions of those admirable 
methods of the Creator which men call Nature, and thus to 
enlarged understanding of the Life which it is one of the 
splendid functions of nature to assist in expounding, so far 
as it is capable of exposition. A notice of them is here, 
therefore, quite in place. Miracles, as wrought by our 
Lord, and by certain of the prophets and disciples, are not, 
as many suppose, at variance with nature, but only with 
unexpanded notions about nature. To assert them to be at 
variance with nature, is to assume, in fact, to know every- 
thing, both about God, and his universe, and his mode of 
managing it. Nothing can be really inconsistent with na- 
ture. It is a first j^i'inciple of true philosophy that events, 
apparently the most unnatural and incompatible, admit, 
nevertheless, of classification, when taken into some higher 
synthesis, that in the long run, everything is referable to 
Law. " Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. 
Every 'general law' is only a particular fact of some more 
general law, presently to disclose itself. There is no out- 
side, no finally enclosing wall. The principle which to-day 
seems circumferential, to-morrow appears included in a 
larger. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that 
around every circle another can be drawn ; that there is no 
end, but that every end is a new beginning." Physical 
science is continually revealing, or at least pointing to such 
wider, more comprehensive, laws, within which the familiar 



MIRACLES AND LAWS OF NATURE. 375 

ones are contained; its progress "is constantly towards larger 
and larger generalizations, towards generalizations, that is, 
which include the generalizations previously established." 
Miracles, for their part, however widely they may be at 
variance with the ordinary course of things, come under a 
law which comprises both themselves and the daily pheno- 
mena which surround us, a law of which the sight is not 
withheld from the inquirer. Everything is a miracle when 
for the first time witnessed; it is our ignorance of the cause 
of the jDhenomenon which gives it the miraculous aspect. 
Gaining clearer knowledge, we refer it to its place. 

216. By taking an example or two from jDhysical science, 
we shall see this great principle without difficulty ; — the laws, 
for instance, under which, in the first place, the leaves of 
plants are produced, and subsequently the flowers, which are 
yet but two different operations of one law. Watch a plant 
during the spring and early summer, and to appearance it 
lives for the sole purpose of multiplying its leaves, and en- 
larging its general fabric ; and were we ourselves to live no 
longer, we should conclude, and allowably, that it was its 
nature to do no more. Presently, however, the production 
of foliage is found to be only a part of the scheme of plant- 
life. As the season advances, our attention is invited to 
another process. The development of stem and leaf abates, 
and the plant covers itself with blossoms. Now did we not 
annually witness the beautiful show ; did the carrying out of 
the whole of the plan of plant-life, which is for flowers to be 
superadded to leaves, at a certain time, for a purpose of their 
own, — did this, we say, take place but once in a thousand 
years, how little short would it be of all the external charac- 
teristics of a miracle. But the exigencies of organization 
require that it should be incessant, so it is depreciated into 
one of the common, spontaneous acts of nature. If not ab- 
solutely a miracle, it is at least a picture of what miracles 



376 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 

are. The flower is from the first, in preparation, — an 
integral jDart of the idea of the plant ; though to the unob- 
servant it conies suddenly, the practiced eye can discern its 
embryo even when the leaf-buds have scarcely begun to open ;, 
beautifully representing in finites what miracles and their 
laws are to the Infinite. For could we see the entire scheme 
of the universe as He alone can see it, we should perceive 
them, unquestionably, bearing a relation to its symmetry and 
inviolable Order, similar to that which, in miniature, the 
flower bears to the plant. So with the phenomena of astro- 
nomical science. The " natural law" of the visible heavens 
is for the planets to move in certain, well-known orbits ; for 
the constellations to change their apparent positions with the 
circling of the hours and seasons, and for various other 
phenomena to transpire, familiar and intelligible enough to 
their student. Yet how many others take place in the dej)ths 
of space which seemingly are altogether anomalous, such as 
most of those connected with comets. Compared with the 
ordinary occurrences, they are miracles. But no ; whatever 
the ignorant may suppose, the astronomer is satisfied that 
they are merely phenomena waiting explanation ; — phe- 
nomena referable to some wider law, which controls our solar 
system, and the constellations, and the comets alike, and 
which science may some day put in the same rank as to in- 
telligibleness, with eclipses and the morphology of j^lants. 
Again ; " the anomaly that water is at its greatest density at 
about 40° Fahr., and below that, expands with decrease of 
temperature, is held by some to be a marvelous and outstand- 
ing fact, setting all theory at defiance. Yet no truly induc- 
tive philosopher for a moment doubts that it is really a part 
and consequence of some higher law, of which the ordinary 
law of expansion is a part."* Much of what it is customary 



* Baden Powell, Unity of Worlds, &c., p. 96. 



EVERY NATURAL EFFECT THE RESULT OF LAW. 377 

to call, in reference to miracles, the " suspension" or " viola- 
tion" of natural laws, is disproved by the phenomena attend- 
ing the operation of counteracting laws ; also by such as come 
of the simultaneous operation of two different laws. For 
instance, it is " a natural law" that fire shall burn ; but at the 
1861 meeting of the British Association, M. Boutiguy passed 
his bare hand harmlessly through a mass of molten metal, 
showing that fire may be prevented from burning, although 
to the spectator who is unacquainted with the scientific reason 
of the prevention, there is no apparent reason why it should 
not burn. The freezing of water in a red-hot platinum 
crucible, which every dextrous chemical teacher now shows 
to his pupils, curiously exemplifies the miracles which come 
of two or more laws acting at the same moment. The very 
notion of an " interference" with natural law is foolish, since 
every effect in nature must necessarily be the result of a law 
instituted to ensure it. In Avhatever department of nature 
they may occur, all such anomalies will unquestionably be 
found some day, to be included under grand and harmonious 
laws. " Nature," in the words of the great master, " pur- 
sues its course, and what we take for an exception, is but in 
accordance with law." As to anomalies, says the acute 
writer just quoted, "the philosopher will always fall back 
upon the primary maxim that it is in every case more j)ro- 
bable that events of an unaccountable and marvelous char- 
acter are parts of some great fixed order of causes unknown 
to us, than that any real interruption occurs."* When we 
speak, accordingly, of the " laws of nature," and define 
miracles, as we suppose, by means of the contrast, we do no 
more than speak of some few laws that lie on the surface. 
Familiar with a certain number of them, we are prone to 
look upon ourselves as admitted into the sanctuary of the 



* Baden Powell, Unity of Worlds, &c., p. 108. 
32 « 



378 INTERRUPTIONS OF NATURE. 

temple, when in reality we are only in the porch. When 
science shall be able to explain the miracles, it will be time, 
and not before, for men to catalogue the " laws of nature." 
That smaller things and principles, perfect in themselves, 
are yet contained within larger ones, is shown as well in the 
forms as in the laws of nature ; of which latter, indeed, ob- 
jective forms are only so many exhibitions. However 
widely objects may vary in configuration and structure 
among themselves, a common idea is found to pervade them 
all. Everything is but a part of a wider complex. In all 
their insatiable variety there is yet contained a permanent 
and unmistakeable unity. The idea of any given " species 
of animal is only part of the idea of the whole animal king- 
dom ; and this again is only part of a still more enlarged 
idea, which comprises both the animal and the vegetable 
kingdoms. This again is a part of the whole idea of the earth, 
which appears at first sight an exclusive little world of 
itself, but is, notwithstanding, only a part of a vast system 
of worlds." 

217. It does but require then that we should carry this 
great general principle to the consideration of the miracles, 
to find them, as affirmed in the outset, at once a portion of 
nature, and one of its most valuable and instructive por- 
tions ; diflfering from the familiar portion only in the cir- 
cumstance of their having been so timed in the general plan 
of creation, as to subserve specific religious purposes. The 
difierence does not consist, as commonly supposed, in the 
putting forth of a greater amount of divine power ; it is a 
difierence only in the mode of the manifestation of that 
power ; or consisting in the unaccustomed shape or formula 
in which, at particular eras, it has been exhibited to men. 
To say that an event such as that of the sudden healing of 
the sick was a " miracle," is strictly nothing more than to 
speak of it as an anomaly in our experience. Whatever 



THE TTSUAL AND THE UNUSUAL. 379 

else the miracles may prove, the first thing they make us 
sensible of is our ignorance ; the first benefit we derive from 
them is impulse therefore to new intellectual effort. There 
is nothing about the miracles to put them absolutely out of 
the pale of our understanding. True, nature has an acces- 
sible and an inaccessible, and it is our wisdom to find out 
where the division lies. But it is also true that nature is a 
vast loromise. Though there are thousands of things not yet 
understood, he would be a bold man who would enumerate 
what things are absolutely incomprehensible. Darkness, 
for the most part, is not so much the darkness of night to 
an eye that is open, as of day to an eye that is closed in 
indifference. The contentment of the world in general with 
the light they possess, is no reason with the Fountain of 
Wisdom for withholding enlarged supplies from those who 
ask for more. It comes therefore to a mere question of in- 
telligence and desire to know. There is every encourage- 
ment to hope and strive. How small a part even of the 
ordinary laws of nature is yet open to the profoundest phil- 
osopher ; yet how clear are the ideas already attained from 
the index which that small part furnishes ! How many 
wonderful processes are gomg on in secret which we know 
nothing of! How many are there which this age was first 
acquainted with ; how many that we are ignorant of will be 
discovered when our memory shall be no more ! We have 
but to abide by the principles which guide us in scientific 
research. With every step upwards, we learn to think more 
of the " common" arrangements of the world, and to lay 
less proportionate stress upon occurrences which are rare, 
because all are found referable to a central spring, rendering 
none more peculiarly strange than another, and taking even 
from the strangest that seeming of an " interference" with 
law, or of " suspension" of law, which at first is all our 
thought. The brute is scared by the lightning, and the un- 



380 MIRACLES AND REJUVENESCENCE. 

tutored mind is aghast at the storm ; both are unobservant 
of the stars and their movements, while all these things are 
to the intelligent as much a part of nature as daylight. 
" The difference between the wise and the unwise is, that the 
latter wonder more at what is unnsnal, the former more at 
what is usual." In reality, what we pass by so indifferently 
as " common," is for the most part, in the highest degree 
extraordinary, habit alone dulling the sight to what we 
should otherwise wonder at as " miraculous," just as we are 
apt to overlook many of the greatest of God's mercies, 
because with us always. 

218. The function or instructive purpose of a miracle is 
Rejuvenescence. Wrought in all cases, either directly or 
indirectly, by Him who " upholdeth all things by the word 
of his power," the miracles, whether judicial, creative, or 
restorative, were acts uniformly bearing a definite and posi- 
tive relation to the highest and heavenliest condition of 
things, the everlasting Eden of Life. How beautifully is it 
told of Naaman, that when miraculously cured of his lep- 
rosy by washing seven times in Jordan, " his flesh came 
again, like unto the flesh of a little child." What could 
show more strikingly that miracles, rightly understood, so 
far from being arbitrary deeds in contravention of nature, 
consist in the removal of hindrances to its proj)er, harmo- 
nious activity? All, without doubt, were indications to man, 
that by his moral degeneracy he is in an abnormal state ; 
that sickness, want, evil, are the tmnatural condition ; that 
the state of Nature is Excellence, Youth, Life ; that these, 
as we have said before, are the one . grand, comprehensive 
idea of the universe, and other things mere accidents and 
phenomena of their history and promotion. "A miracle," 
says Dr. Gumming, "is not, as some have tried to show, 
contrary to nature, but is above and beyond what we call 
nature. For instance, when we read of our Lord's healing 



COERESPONDENCES OF DISEASES. 381 

the sick, and raising the dead, we hear it said that it is con- 
trary to nature. It is no such thing. We call it contrary 
to nature, because we say that sickness is natural. Sickness 
is not natural ; it is an unna,tnrdl thing — a discord in the 
glorious harmony. So with death. Death is the unnatural 
thing, and the natural thing is putting an end to death, and 
bringing back glorious and everlasting life. Healing the 
sick, and raising the dead, are the perfection of nature; 
they are the bringing back of nature to its pristine state ; 
the restoration of the primaeval harmony, the augury of 
future happiness ; they are demonstrations to us that all the 
prophecies which describe paradise are possibilities. Every 
miracle of our Lord is a specimen of that new genesis under 
which there shall be no more sickness, but wherein former 
things shall have passed away, and all things shall be made 
new."* 

219. What maladies of the soul are specifically repre- 
sented by given diseases, it is easy to perceive. Those which 
are mentioned in the Bible furnish a clue to all. Leprosy, 
for example, corresponds to profanation ; or the knowledge 
of what is right, but contempt and neglect of the practice 
of it. Reverence for divine truth, and obedience to it, is 
the very first step in regeneration ; hence, the first person 
cured after the sermon on the mount was one afilicted with 
the disease in question. The next was one "sick of the 
palsy;" the condition of the paralytic exactly represents the 
infirmity of the human will. Fever represents anger, rage, 
and fury in their various degrees, whence its frequent meta- 



* Foreshadows, vol. i. Lectures on the Miracles of our Lord, as 
earnests of the Age to come, p. 9. In saying that death is unnatural, 
Dr. Gumming of course is influenced by the low and popular notion 
respecting death which we have had occasion to correct above. Pp. 
73—76. 



382 SALVATION IS HEALTH OP SOUL. 

pliorical use alike in poetry and colloquial converse. Fur- 
ther illustrations may be seen in the Rev. Isaac Williams' 
" Thoughts on the Study of the Holy Gospels," and in Dr. 
Duncan's little work just now spoken of. 

220. Because of the correspondence we are considering, 
our Lord is called the great Physician and the Saviour. 
The former name signifies one who restores to a state of 
nature ; the latter, the healer or health-giver. " Salvation" 
is derived from the Latin salus health, salvus healthy, which 
in French reappears as sauf, the proximate root of save. 
Salvation, accordingly, is that which, as the work of God 
saves or heals our souls. Hence the cry of David — Lord, 
heal my soul ! and the prayer of the prophet — Heal me, 
Lord, and I shall be healed ; save me, and I shall be saved. 
Jesus Christ, as the Sun of Righteousness, is said to bring 
healing on his wings. Etymologically, " heal" and " save" 
are the same word, as readily seen by grouping together the 
several collateral forms, as "whole," and the Greek oP.oc. 
The hale man is he who is Avhole ; health is literally a state 
of wholeness. Primarily, the words heal and save thus 
mean to make sound or entire, as when a wound is healed, 
and the new skin grown over. The numerous sad pictures 
in Scripture of the depraved moral state as one of wounds, 
laceration, and bleeding, give to these words, as there used, 
an unspeakable beauty and appropriateness. How sub- 
limely it is ascribed to the Lord, that " He healeth the 
stroke of their wound !" Derived from the same primitive 
root, through another channel, and denoting the same idea, 
are the words solace, console, consolation. An incurable 
grief, the wound of heart that remains open till death, Ovid 
beautifully calls vulnus ineonsolabilis. Life and health, or 
wholeness, imply unity, integrity, perfection ; hence we find 
the earth, " the firm, round earth," called solum, and what- 
ever is like it in its integrity, Bo\id, whether material or 



MUSIC AND MEDICINE. 383 

spiritual. We speak of a solid understanding, as Horace 
of mens solida, a fixed resolution. To consolidate ia to 
make perfect or entire. The idea of suck entirety is tke 
ground of tke adjective solus, alone ; and reappears also in 
^XcoQ, or Sol, tke sun. Helios was tke same as Pkoebus 
Apollo, tke god of day and of ligkt, and tke fatker of ^scu- 
lapius, tke god of medicine, if not tke god of medicine or 
kealing in kis own person ; for tkougk in later times tkere 
were as many as four Apollos distinguisked, tkis was proba- 
bly but in keeping witk tke tendency of tke Grecian mind 
to ckange tke several attributes of a deity into as many dis- 
tinct gods. ■ Tke primitive idea was tke sun, tke fountain of 
ligkt; to tkis, as a matter of course, followed life and 
kealtk ; and by anotker beautiful perception, tke same deity 
presided over music, one of tke soul's ckief comforters and 
kealers, wkence its medicinal fame from time immemorial. 
" Tke poets," says Lord Bacon, " did well to conjoin music 
and medicine in Apollo, since tke ofiice of medicine is but 
to tune tkis curious karp of man's body, and to reduce it to 
karmony." Apollo was tke pagan aspiration after Ckrist ; 
one of kis surnames was GcoT-f]p, Saviour. His worskip, kis 
festivals, kis oracles, all kad more weiglit and influence witk 
tke Greeks tkan tkose of any otker deity tkey worskiped. 
Tkey would never kave become wkat tkey were witkout tke 
worskip of Apollo ; in kim was tke brigktest side of tke 
Grecian mind reflected. He wko is tke True Ligkt, tke 
Ligkt wkick is tke life of men, reveals kimself also as 
Healer of tke nations, in kis " lovely song of one tkat 
playetk well uj)on an instrument." 

221. Tke profound and beautiful relations indicated in 
tke above ideas are acknowledged alike by tkeology and 
pkilosopky, by science, poetry, and language; all of wkick 
testify tkat like tke Bible in its multiplicity of translations, 
tke great, primal trutks of creation are yet but varied pre- 



384 UNITY OP TRUTH, 

sentations of One truth. Every cluster of human know- 
ledge is consanguineous with every other cluster, like the 
bunches of grapes upon a vine, and our highest and most 
delightful intellectual exercise is to realize their unity, and 
their common origin. How beautifully, for instance, does 
science illustrate the correspondence of Light and Music, as 
regards the fundamental tones of the musical scale and the 
prismatic colors! The colors thrown by the prism upon the 
wall are the sounds of music, in a different sphere, so that 
whatever is representatively expressed in Light, is repre- 
sentatively expressed also in the harmonies which please the 
ear, the difference being only in the method. 'The corres- 
pondence is not a discovery of science; strictly speaking, 
science discovers very little; its function is rather to covfirm. 
We speak intuitively of the "harmony of colors;" the poet 
in every age finds music in the lovely variegations of natural 
scenery, and equally detects in music that exquisite inter- 
weaving and melody of tints, which contributes so largely to 
the objective picturesque. The harp of Memnon is not a 
fable; the glow of the rising sun is a song wherever it may 
shine; "every lover of nature who, seated on a mountain or 
by the ocean, has witnessed the sun casting his first golden 
beams across the earth, has had his soul stirred by its hea- 
venly music;" heard faintly and from afar, as it is in towns, 
still how divinely glad and animating are its strains! Sun- 
rise may well have been deemed the return of a god : it is 
not merely the awakener of the world to life; the whole 
idea of life is representatively summed up in it, as in a happy 
and beautiful child descending upon the household as its 
morning-beam. Thus is it with all knowledge; the wider 
and higher the laws of nature we can discover, the more 
admirable and extended is our insight into nature, and the 
more of it do we enjoy at any given moment, as by grasping 
the stem on which they grow, we secure a whole posy of 



THE VEILED ISIS. 385 

flowers at once. Far, we can never penetrate, yet may 
every man more deeply than he does. Isis still presents her 
countenance veiled as of old; but while she with disdain 
rejects the mere dissector and nomenclator, who cares only 
to inspect her as an anatomist; to him who would look upon 
her Avith the eyes of a lover, she will grant divinest glimpses. 
That heavenly face is hidden from the world only that rude 
profanity shall not stare at it; it is in wise encouragement 
that it should be so ; for if, according to the inscription, no 
mortal may uncover it, we must seek then to be immortal. 
He whose heart faints because discomfited while on earth, is 
no true disciple at Sa'is. 

33 R 



CHAPTER XXII. 

MORTALITY jLND IMMOItTAI^ITr. 

222. With so solemn and inevitable a destiny as Death 
forever looming in the future, it is not surprising that the 
leading text of the moralist and preacher in every age 
should be preparation for it ; or that, viewing the changes 
which it works, and contemplating them only in their 
mournful aspect, the verses of the poet should be strown so 
profusely with elegiacs. Laments over the evanescence of 
the beautiful constitute some of the richest poetry the world 
possesses ; and were even prose literature to be sifted for its 
gems, they would probably be found in connection with the 
same grateful but melancholy theme, as the loveliest hours 
of the summer are those which are wet with the tears of 
Eos. There are no monopolies in the kingdom of thought 
and feeling ; the spirit by which modern or Christian medi- 
tations on life and death are often thought to be distin- 
guished from those of the ancients, is itself cosmopolite, as 
well as cotemporaneous with all eras ; for although the par- 
ticular phraseology which the New Testament has supplied, 
is in the writings of pagan moralists necessarily absent, 
those writings breathe nevertheless, along with their sad- 
ness, a serene and earnest piety, which may be found if 
there be disposition to acknowledge it when met with. 
That the ancients' moralizings on life and death are com- 
parable with those of Christian writers, it is by no means 
meant to assert. Unhappily, there is but too much room 

386 



THE TRUE FUNCTION OF THE POET. 387 

for censure, especially as regards that ample portion where 
the scantiness and transiency of our temporal opportunities 
are made an argument for sensual indulgence — when they 
cry — " Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we 
die." The verses ascribed to Anacreon and other Greek 
poets, those likewise of Horace, Propertius, and Catullus, in- 
citing to such indulgence, are well known to every lover of 
classical literature. Yet even these have their better, per- 
haps their redeeming aspect, and this, in merest prudence, 
should be considered first. Nothing is ever lost, while much 
is always gained, by attending to the good of a thing before 
its evil. Catullus' address to Lesbia, for instance, beginning 

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, 

which beautiful little poem may be taken as a type of all 
its class, has in it something so exquisitely tender and afi'ect- 
ing that we can readily suppose the poet to have laid so 
much stress upon the certainty of never returning into the 
sunshine of terrestrial life, in order to encourage mankind to 
value that life as it deserves, and to enjoy it as intensely as 
the Creator desires we should. As the perishableness of the 
rose quickens our sense of its beauty and fragrance, so the 
picture of Joy, with Death in the distance, inspires us with 
new interest in our innumerable temporal delights, given us, 
as they are, " richly to enjoy." We need such reminders ; 
men weaken in soul as well as body; the glow and ardor of 
love for the beautiful and true die from out of them, like 
strength from the limbs, if not watched and fed ; the high and 
glorious function of the poet is, that he comes to us with his 
stronger soul, and sets us growing and living afresh. Such 
restorative, invigorative influence it is the nature and utility 
of all true poetry to exert upon us, and the degree in which 
it vitalizes is the token of the poet's genius. And though 
his particular theme, as in the song referred to, which dwells 



388 LIFE TO BE MADE THE MOST OF. 

wholly upon kisses, may seem trite and poor, still he is none 
the less faithful to his mission if he awaken lofty and amia- 
ble sentiments. The physical images with which he deals, 
are so many figures and representatives, which it is for our- 
selves to translate into their significance, making out a new 
poem in our own minds. The opposition of ideas, so re- 
markable in the opening lines of the song spoken of, has a 
beautiful reflex in the Arcadian landscaj)e of Poussin, re- 
presenting rural festivity, the charm of which would be 
sensibly diminished, were it destitute of the monument and 
inscription.* 

223. Be it Catullian or not, the sentiment that we should 
make the most of life ; that as we go along we should enjoy 
every gift of God as ardently and as copiously as we can, 
consistently with sobriety and order, is a perfectly right and 
proper one — it is more, it is one of our first and highest 
duties. To sell one's self to sensuality is one thing ; thank- 
fully to accept, and temperately to enjoy the honest plea- 
sures of the senses, is quite a different matter. Sight and 
hearing, taste and touch, were bestowed for no other end 
than to be exercised on things congenial to them. The true 
way to enjoy most of heaven is previously to strive how 
much we can enjoy of earth ; not, however, by striving to 
enjoy it exclusively as an earthly thing, still less as a sensu- 
ous one, to the neglect of the moral and intellectual ; neither 
again by laying ourselves out for pleasure, purely as such, 
but by taking as our ruling motive, in our search for enjoy- 
ment, the higher development of our humanity. The golden 
rule of all is to connect, as often and as closely as we can, 
the terrestrial with the heavenly. The highest delight of 



* For a variety of beautiful commentary and quotation upon this 
subject, see Dunlop's History of Eoman Literature, vol. 1, p. 470. 



VALUE OF OPPORTUNITIES. 389 

which human intelligence is susceptible is that which comes 
of the habit of translating the ordinary circumstances of 
daily life into ideas that lead ultimately to God ; there are 
no truly beautiful and nourishing ideas but such as are 
felt to gravitate imperceptibly towards Him, while none are 
so practical and efficacious, as ingredients of happiness, as 
those that are sucked, honey-like, from the merest trifles of 
existence. So in regard to the time for enjoyment. Though 
we may rely upon the recurrence of some few sources of 
pleasure, the greater part are so fitful, the total of the cir- 
cumstances is so unlikely ever to be the same again, and 
our own changes of emotional state are so frequent and ex- 
treme — what enraptures to-day often becoming distasteful 
and even bitter on the morrow — that if we would realize 
life in its fullness, we must let no chance, not the slightest, 
escape, though at the moment it may seem utterly insignifi- 
cant. Life is made up of minutes, and its happiness of cor- 
responding little pleasures ; the wise man secures the atoms 
as they flit past him, and thus become owner of the aggre- 
gate. Making every circumstance of life, sensuous, moral, 
and intellectual, and every day and hour, contribute a little 
something, he finds that though a brilliant and memorable 
pleasure may come but twice or thrice, the secret of a happy 
life is nevertheless his own. That fine secret is not so much 
to lay plans for acquiring happy days, as to pluck our en- 
joyment on the spot ; in other words, to spend that time in 
being happy which so many lose in deliberating and scheming 
how to become so. 

Non est, crede mihi, sapiente dicere Vivam; 
Sera nimis vita est crastina, vive hodie. 

I'll live to-morrow, 'tis not wise to say ; 
'Twill be too late to-morrow, — live to-day. 

To accomplish this, we have only, as said before, to make the 
33 » 



390 LIFE HAS A PRIZE FOR EVERY OIS^E. 

most of each little incident and opportunity, contemning 
and repudiating nothing; always remembering, however, 
that the way to make such incidents and opportunities most 
prolific of enjoyment is so to humanize them that they shall 
flower into thoughts of heaven. Wilfully to let opportuni- 
ties go by, is a wickedness and an inexcusable folly ; whence 
the still more foolish regrets which tear the heart that has 
been so unjust to itself — for folly is only another name for 
thorn and prickle seed ; — but a greater folly yet, is to stand 
waiting and wishing for opportunities, when in fact they cir- 
cle us, if we will but keep on the qui vive. As the best 
school in respect of high duties is the j)ractice of the little 
ones of common life, so the best and shortest road to happi- 
ness and true philosophy is to make the most of what lies 
beside us, and enjoy all we can of the life we have, leaving 
it to God to determine what fortune shall attend our steps. 
Dominiis providehit If we trusted more in his sponta- 
neous generosity, we should seldomer be disconcerted by the 
failure of our own preparations, and should find that the 
Divine intent is that life shall be felicitous. The same, did 
we ask ourselves more frequently what we have, rather than 
brood so ungratefully upon what we have not. Though 
we may be poor and afilicted in comparison with some, in 
contrast with others we are opulent and blest. Life has a 
prize for every one who will open his heart to receive it; 
though it may be a very different one from the spirit of his 
early dreams. " There is no greater mistake," says a thought- 
ful writer, " in contemplating the issues of life, than to sup- 
pose that baffled endeavors and disappointed hopes bear no 
fruits, because they do not bear those particular fruits which 
were sought and sighed for. 

"The tree 
Sucks kindlier nurture from a soil enrich'd 
By its own fallen leaves, and man is made 



SORROW FOR THE DEAD. 391 

In heart and spirit, from deciduous hopes, 
And things that seem to perish."* 

The disproportion in men's inheritances is far less than we 
are prone to think. If one hand of the universal Giver be 
closed, the other is expanded ; no one is left without his 
meed of compensation, only in our weakness and unthank- 
fulness we look more at the darker side of our own lot, and 
at what appears to us the brighter side of our neighbor's. 
Epictetus explains the mystery in part ; " it is not Fortune 
that is blind, but ourselves." Whatever be our lot, if man 
will but just concede that that must be best for him which 
the Best of Beings has ordained, life thenceforward has a 
solace which no fortune can wi'est away. 

224. Thankful, hopeful, happy as we may be. Death 
comes at last, and familiar as we may have made it in 
thought as a general proposition, always so strangely and 
solemnly as to be incredible and unexpected ; in the case of 
those we love, as an impossibility suddenly converted into 
a reality. Immortal until taken away from us, now for the 
first time we become aware that they were only lent, and 
mourning and grieving seem to be the only real and perma- 
nent things of earth. There is no wrong done in giving way 
to such emotions. To be troubled at the death of those we 
love, and to shrink from death on our own part, are equally 
in obedience to heaven-implanted instincts, and the former 
is always the sign of an amiable and tender disposition. 
Luther thought that the punishment of Adam partly con- 
sisted in his long life of nine hundred years, seeing that in 
the space of it he would lose so many friends. They are 
emotions, nevertheless, which require to be controlled, and 
which demand, no less, that they shall not be perverted. 



* Henry Taylor, " Notes from Life." 



392 TRUE WAY TO HONOR THE DEAD. 

Our moral and intellectual knowledge we should ever allow 
to remind us of the high purposes they are intended to serve, 
and to lift us out of useless and ungrateful regrets. The 
Creator disposes us to be grieved at the decease of our 
friends, in order that all humane and kindly feelings may 
be awakened and deepened. It is for the sake of the sur- 
vivors that he leads us to sorrow for those who die; that the 
wretchedness it is to be bereaved of those we love, with the 
inevitable reflection that enters into it of how much we have 
left undone that would have contributed to their happiness, 
may incite us to be more generous to those who are with us 
still. True mourning for the dead is to live as they desire 
we should do, and as we feel most pleasure in having others 
live towards ourselves. Any other is little different from 
selfishness. "We do not honor the dead by withdrawing 
our sympathy from the living, or neglecting occasions of 
being as useful to them as we were to the individual we 
mourn. No man loses by death the whole of his friends and 
acquaintance, and can say that his generation has left him 
alone. The place of those who are gone will be supplied by 
others; the circle perpetually renews itself; to determine 
that none can or shall be so good in our eyes as the departed, 
is at once to behave uncharitably to mankind, and to refuse 
the compensations which God provides." Thus does the 
death, so called, of those of our friends and companions who 
precede us in the return to youth, provide vis with the most 
favorable opportunity of testing how much life there is .in 
ourselves. For the value and reality of a friend consist, 
essentially, in his influence on the development of our affec- 
tions, charming them, as with a song, into love of the Good 
and Beautiful, and this, to the soul that is in right order, 
the mere dissolution of the body but little hinders. All that 
is dearest and loveliest in those who go first, all that makes 
it good for our souls to possess such treasures, remains with 



DEATH NOT A MISFORTUNE. 393 

US, if we love truly, after they are gone. Friends, parents, 
children, brothers, sisters, though they may quit their accus- 
tomed places, and be no more seen, die to us only when in 
our inconstancy we forget them. Life is love. So long as 
we love a thing we retain it. It is only when we cease to 
love it that it dies. "To me, indeed," says Cicero, speaking 
of his lost friend Scipio, "though he was suddenly snatched 
away, Scipio still lives, and will always live, for I love the 
virtue of that man, and that worth is not extinguished. If 
the recollection of these things had died along with him, I 
could in nowise have borne the loss of that most intimate 
and affectionate friend. But these things have not perished ; 
nay, they are cherished rather and improved by reflection 
and memory."* Rightly regarded, the death of a friend is 
one of the greatest mercies God bestows upon us. Not only 
does it operate upon the development of the affections; but 
"through the gap which it makes in the visible, we gain a 
vision into the awful, invisible life of which it was for a mo- 
ment the semblance. We see what we had forgotten, or 
never properly known, that the life we lead in the flesh is 
only the appearance, and that the hidden life of the spirit is 
the reality, and thence are we warned from walking "in 
vain show ;" for it is no other than walking in vain show, to 
surrender ourselves, as we are so prone, to matter and mate- 
rial things, and turn deafly from the message of the spirit- 
ual." In its purity, sorrow for the dead is a part of that 
elegant sentiment of our nature which leads us to sigh at the 
ruin of the beautiful, wherever it may pertain, or however 
it may appeal. The heart of that man is not to be envied, 
who can see the leaves wither and the flowers fall, without 
some sentiment of regret, or who can pass unnoticed the 



* De Amicitia, at the end. 



394 DEATH AN OPERATION OF PROVIDENCE. 

dried-up fountain, or the time-worn, roofless, silent abbey. 
The tender interest which every rightly-ordered mind feels 
in the frailty of the beautiful, alike of nature and of art, is 
only a slight tribute of becoming grief and affection, seeing 
that it is under its benign and humanizing influence that we 
grow in wisdom, and become conscious of delight; our sor- 
row for the dead, so lovely as they were to our hearts, is this 
self-same tribute, only deserved infinitely better. Far, 
accordingly, from our thoughts should be the idea of misfor- 
tune in connection with death. "To have laid a strong 
affection down among the dead, may be a great sorrow, but 
is not a real misfortune. Whatever one's after-goings may 
be, there is a deposit for the future life, a stake in the better 
country, a part for the heart which the grave keeps holy, in 
spite of the evil that is in the world. The living may change 
to us, or we to them ; sin may divide, strife may come be- 
tween, but through all times and fortunes, the dead remain 
the same to our memories and loves. The child taken from 
us long ago is still the innocent lamb that was not for our 
folding ; the early lost friend is still the blessed of our youth, 
a hope not to be withered, a promise not to be broken, a 
possession wherein there is no disappointment." 

225. If it be inconsiderate, or unkind, or unwise, to mourn 
for the dead merely in the shape of regret for their depar- 
ture, it cannot be wisdom to complain if part of our own 
time seem withheld. That a man should lament at having 
to die, be it soon or late, indicates neither philosophy nor 
religion. No one who is in a right state of mind ever even 
thinks about death. He thinks only of his life, knowing 
that if this be properly regulated and developed, death, 
come when it may, will but invigorate and renew"him. It 
would be difficult to find a greater or more pernicious error 
than that so often propounded as "religion," that men 
should be always looking forward to their "end." They 



DEATH OCCURS AT THE RIGHT MOMENT. 395 

should never be looking forward to their end ; they should 
be too intent upon their present. True religion does not 
concern itself as to how and when men die, but as to the 
quality of their current life. Men are not saved according 
to how they die, but according to how they live. Death 
takes no man unprepared, whenever it may come, wherever 
he may be, or however employed. Neither could he die at 
a better time, were he allowed even to choose and arrange 
for himself; because God, who fixes it, is the only compe- 
tent judge of our spiritual condition, and causes us to die at 
the precise moment when it will be best for our eternal wel- 
fare, whether we be tending upwards or downwards. Even 
to the most wicked, death is an operation of mercy, seeing 
that it is of Him who maketh the sun of his love, no less 
than that of nature, " to rise both on the evil and on the 
good, and sendeth rain both on the just and on the unjust." 
If to one man life be " providentially spared," the life of 
another is providentially taken. The only ground on which 
we can properly lament the ending of our sojourn on earth, 
is that it prevents our being any longer corporeally useful 
to others. But in thinking only of life, and never of death, 
we are not to think only of our tinie-\\iQ. We should think 
of our life as a stream, which commencing in a wilderness, 
presently leaps from it in a waterfall, and thereafter pursues 
its endless course through a country infinitely rich and 
beautiful with nature, art, civilization, and religion, reflect- 
ing in its serene and softly gliding depths, each heavenly 
scene it visits. Darwin remarks that we are less dazzled by 
the light on waking, if we have been dreaming of visible 
objects. Happy are they who in this life dream of higher 
things than those of earth ! They will the sooner be able 
to see the glories of the world to come. Living here the 
true life of the soul, we shall start at once from the slumber 
of temporal existence into shining and intelligible morning. 



896 FEAR OF DEATH. 

To me the thought of death is terrible, 

Having such hold on life. To thee it is not 

So much even as the lifting of a latch ; 

Only a step into the open air 

Out of a tent already luminous 

With light that shines through its transparent walls. 

Wisdom, then, dictates that life should be our great and 
only regard. For the first office of wisdom is to give things 
their due valuation, to estimate aright how much they are 
worth ; and the second is to treat them according to their 
worthiness. 

226. The /ear of death is quite another matter. As said 
above, it is the simple emotion of nature, the play of a 
divinely-implanted instinct, and thus conformable to the 
just order of things. Virtually, it is the impulse to selj- 
preservation, the profoundest instinct of the whole animal 
creation, seeing that without it, every species, man included, 
would soon become extinct. The innumerable physical 
perils which endanger life ; and in man, the mental suffer- 
ings superadded to them, would lead, in difierent instances, 
either to its accidental loss, or its willing surrender, almost 
as soon as possessed, and thus to the depopulating of the 
world. How rapidly does life even now become lost, despite 
the desire to preserve it ! Save for the great impulse within, 
to Live, whatever it may cost, the world would cease to be 
replenished, and " Be fruitful and multiply" have been an 
impractical command. Men differ about arts and sciences, 
about their pleasures, fashions, ornaments, and avocations, 
but all are agreed in the love of life, and hate, and fear, 
and flee from death. "We do not all philosophize," says 
Clemens, " but do we not all follow after life ?" " This tem- 
poral life," says another venerable writer, " though full of 
labor and trouble, yet is desired by all, both old and young, 



DEATH MAY BE MET CHEERFULLY. 397 

princes and peasants, wise men and fools."* Virtue, wis- 
dom, poetry, the Bible, are matters which from intellectual 
slow-pacedness, or moral disrelish, excite only moieties of 
interest, but life is the central, universal, indomitable 
solicitude. 

The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
That age, ache, penury or imprisonment 
Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
To what we fear of death. 

Man needs, in truth, to love life, if only from the immensity 
of function which he is qualified to perform ; and doubtless 
it is in order that he may avail himself of his opportunities, 
if he will, and build up his futurity, that the love of the 
merely animal life is made so strong in him ; for this is the 
first essential to the incomparable privileges of existence. 
It is by reason of the great excellence of life, as a spiritual 
necessity, that the deepest injury that can be inflicted is to 
kill, and that the highest philanthropy and goodness is to 
preserve alive. To lay down one's life for another implies 
the most ardent of all possible love, because it is the relin- 
quishment of our richest treasure. 

227. The man, accordingly, who afiects to regard death 
without fear, must not expect to be believed. He may not 
anticipate it with horror ; he may have learned, by secret 
and silent preparation of the heart, and by accustoming 
himself to see God as infinitely just and merciful, how to 
meet it cheerfully ; he may be perfectly resigned to it when 
he sees its approaching shadow ; but still he dreads, and 
were the spirit not withdrawn by him who gave it, would 
never part with it of himself When death is actually about 
to happen, the fear of it is in great measure lost. At all 



* Lactantius, Book iii., chap. 12. 
34 



398 SENSATIONS OF THE DYING. 

events it is not common, as well known to those whose pro- 
fessions lead them to the pillows of the dying. This, again, 
is a vast mercy and providence of God, both to the individ- 
ual and to the bystanders. Given to us when it is proper 
we should live, it is mercifully taken away when we are 
going to depart. When we fear death most, supposing that 
is, that there is no sufficient physical reason for the fear, we 
are probably entering on our highest usefulness to the world. 
When fear does manifest itself at the period of approaching 
death, it is rather as the result of some diseased or enfeebled 
state of mind, usually induced by spurious religious teach- 
ing ; or of vivid presentiments of what a wicked life is about 
to lead to ; than as a part of the animal instinct which pre- 
viously had ruled. As a rule, death, at the last hour, like 
Satan, appears only to those who have reason to be afraid 
of him, and rarely even to these. Nothing is more decep- 
tive than the manner in which a person dies, though often 
made so much of. The wickedest die " in peace" no sel- 
domer than the righteous, though it is the peace of torpor in 
one case, or piety in the other. The inmost ground of men's 
fear of death is consciousness of severance from God, through 
disobedience to his law. Brutes fear to die simply because 
of their instinct to preserve life, or from the purely animal 
feeling. Men fear to die from a twofold ground ; super- 
ficially, from the same instinct as that of the brutes; in- 
teriorly, from consciousness of this severance from their 
Maker. God desires that all men should be united to him, 
and to this end has given them adequate spiritual faculties, 
wherein they shall exercise the life which conducts to heaven. 
In proportion as they do this, and thereby attain to con- 
sciousness of union with Him, the idea of death departs 
from them, because they are living with the Fountain of 
Life ; the less that they feel united, the more do they think 
of death, and fear to die. While, accordingly, the righteous 



WHY IS MAN IMMORTAL ? 399 

man views his physical death with no alarm, the unrighteous 
carries his fear with him even mto the future state. Fear 
of death is not so much according to the place a person is in, 
as according to the condition of his heart. It is its own dis- 
solution of which the soul, in its secret chambers, is afraid; 
and the sense of dislocation from God which gives the real 
agony to the expectation of death here, will constitute a simi- 
lar but infinitely severer torment hereafter; as in heaven the 
greatest blessing will be the sensation of coherence with God, 
or Life. To fancy, as many do, that death is. not only terri- 
ble and affrighting, but physically painful, is quite a mistake, 
being to look for sensibility in the loss of sensibility. Death 
is a sleep rather than a sensation, a suspension of our faculties 
rather than a conflict with them ; instead of a time of suffer^ 
ing, a time of deepening unconsciousness. Dr. Baillie tells 
us that his observation of death-beds inclines him to the firm 
belief that nature intended we should go out of the world 
as unconsciously as we come into it. The moment, says 
Mrs. Jameson, " in which the spirit meets death is probably 
like that in which it is embraced by sleep. To be conscious 
of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping 
state never, I suppose, happened to any one." 

228. TFAy is man immortal ? Not simply because the soul is 
non-material. We must not suppose, remarks Warburton, 
that because the soul is immaterial, it is necessarily imper- 
ishable. Though it does not dissolve after the manner of 
matter, that is no reason why it should not be susceptible of 
extinction in some other way.* To suppose otherwise would 
be to esteem it of the same substance as the Creator, instead 
of one of his creatures, as it is. Of all the arguments for 
the immortality of the soul, that of its being "immaterial" 



* Divine Legation of Moses, Book ix., chap. 1. 



400 IMMATERIALITY OF THE SOUL NO ARGUMENT. 

is unquestionably the weakest. " The immortality of 
the soul," says Dr. Knapp, in the Christian Theology, 
" neither depends for proof upon its immateriality, nor from 
the latter can it be certainly deduced." To the same effect 
is the remark of Mr. Isaac Taylor : — " As to the pretended 
demonstrations of immortality drawn from the assumed 
simplicity and indestructibility of the soul as an immaterial 
substance, they appear altogether inconclusive."* It would 
be easy to show indeed, that he who affirms man to be im- 
mortal simply because of the immateriality of the soul, is 
bound to affirm likewise the immortality not only of the 
nobler animals, but even of the microscopic animalculse, 
which would be contrary alike to reason and revelation. 
Bishop Butler's argument for the immortality of the soul, 
namely, that in fatal diseases the mind often remains vigor- 
ous to the last, though commonly esteemed one of the 
strongest, is actually of no more worth than the argument 
of immateriality. Any function will remain vigorous to the 
last if the organ of its exercise be not the seat of the disease. 
Immortality inheres in the soul of man not because it is 
immaterial or spiritual as to substance, but by virtue of the 
"breath of lives" which God breathed into man in the 
beginning; the life of intelligence to hnow him, and the life 
of power and adaptedness to love him. It is through the 
possession of these two faculties that man lives forever, in 
happiness or in misery, according as they are honored or 
abused, and not merely because he possesses a soul or spi- 
ritual body. They remain with him, and thus keep him 
alive forever, because given by infinite, divine, unchangeable 
Love, which, whatever it gives once, it gives everlastingly. 
Were God to withdraw life from man, even for an instant, 



Physical Theory of another Life, page 254. 



SUPPOSED IMMORTALITY OF BRUTES. 401 

he would not be the Faithful and the True. The very 
object of the creation of man was, that a being should exist 
competent to receive and reciprocate this love. Love lives 
by reciprocity. Its most exquisite satisfaction and delight 
is at once to love and be loved back again by the chosen 
one of the bosom and the offspring of the body. Not simply 
to exhibit his power or his skill, did God create the uni- 
verse, but that his love might have an arena, and that hap- 
piness inexpressible should animate innumerable hearts. To 
think of God aright, we must think at the same moment of 
a universe of intelligent and feeling creatures, for each idea 
is needful to the true reading of the other. Any idea of 
God which does not include man, is low and imperfect. 
Banish then the fancy that man is immortal because he has 
an "immaterial" soul. It needs to be something more than 
"immaterial;" it must be adapted to religious exercises; just 
as it avails nothing to the Ourang Outang to be organized, 
he must be adapted to talk and to manipulate, if he is to 
enter the ranks of humanity. 

229. It is because these two faculties — intelligence to 
know and adaptedness to love — are not possessed, that 
brutes are only temporal. They cannot entertain heavenly 
ideas — they cannot feel religious emotions; — as Wesley beau- 
tifully expresses it, they are not " creatures capable of God." 
Unprofitably indeed has the time been spent by those who 
have sought to show that brutes are immortal, or even have 
any claim to be. The chief argument with those who have 
espoused the notion, has been the "justice of God," which 
requires, they contend, that brutes should live over again, 
in order to be recompensed for the evils they suffer here. 
This, indeed, is the only argument, as there is nothing in 
brutes which shows them to be placed here for probationary 
and preparative discipline, as man is ; such discipline being 
not only needful to heaven, and the reason of man's being 

3i* R« 



402 BRUTES HAVE NO PEAR OF DEATH. 

made a free moral agent, but one of the best natural proofs 
of the destiny of him who is subjected to it. Brutes have 
none of the pains, anxieties, and disquietudes arising from 
moral causes, to which man is subject. They haye none of 
his love of virtue, thirst of knowledge, or intense and con- 
stant longing after such a degree of happiness as this liie 
not only never gives, but is absolutely incaj)able of afford- 
ing. The plea above-mentioned is therefore the only one. 
But is it a reasonable plea ? That the infliction of cruelties 
on brutes by man must one day be accounted for by him is 
certain, because of the great and shameful wickedness of ill- 
treating and giving pain to the defenseless. Probably, 
however, all these cruelties and pains appear to brutes as so 
many accidents, devoid of meaning or intentional harm, and 
no more than the fall upon them of a tree or a house. That 
they suffer with the intensity commonly supposed, may also 
be seriously doubted. In reasoning concerning the feelings 
of the lower animals, we are too apt to reason from our 
own — a course which cannot but lead to error. That which 
so enormously aggravates physical suffering in man, is the 
operation of his imagination. Brutes, being destitute of this 
faculty, perceive only by moments, without reflecting uj)on 
past and future, and time and life without reflection are, as 
we all know, next neighbors to no-tune and no-life. Suffer- 
ing, alone and definite, is incomparably less afilictive than 
when combined with various and indefinite trouble of mind. 
Let none suppose that divulging this to mankind at large 
would be to the prejudice of the brute creation. The gentle 
and kind will always treat brutes gently and kindly, what- 
ever their feeling or want of feeling ; while tlie cruel will 
always treat them cruelly, as they do their own species. 

230. Whether or no, that pain, hunger, thirst, and other 
such "evils," (which are all that brutes can be seen to en- 
dure,) require compensation in another life, is after all, no 



SUFFERINGS AND ENJOYMENTS OP BRUTES. 403 

ai'gument, because it Las yet to be proved that these are 
evils ; and query, is not the physical enjoyment of all crea- 
tures quite a balance against their physical sufferings? The 
enjoyment of the brute creation is immense. We cannot 
turn our eyes in any direction, but we witness an exuberance 
of it. Earth, air, and water alike swarm with beings full 
of the delight of living, and collectively, perhaps experienc- 
ing as large an amount of agreeable physical sensation as 
does the total of the human race. No small part of this 
happiness is of man's own bounty to them, though certainly 
for his own interest in the end. "He spreads the verdant 
mead, and lays out pleasure-grounds for the horse, the ox, 
the sheep, and the deer; and the pang that deprives them 
of existence is as nothing compared to their antecedent life 
of luxury. Were there no men to till the ground, the earth 
would not maintain a thousandth part of the animals it does 
at present, and the want of cultivation would also unfit it 
for the mass of living insect enjoyment with which it now 
swarms." Besides, in the lower grades of animals, whose 
numbers compared with those of the higher kinds, or quad- 
rupeds and birds, are as the sands of the sea, physical suffer- 
ing is little, if at all experienced. As regards these, accord- 
ingly, the plea of recompense cannot stand, and this is 
enough to condemn the whole hypothesis. When we see 
fishes and insects apparently writhing in pain, it is not that 
they are in a state of agonizing torture, but that they are 
struggling to he free. Those vehement efforts come simply 
of impatience of control, a desire common to every living- 
creature. Nothing that has life but rebels against captivity. 
Imprison even a plant, and it becomes as restless, in its 
sphere of being, as a chained animal. Pain, in fact, is so 
slight in the humbler classes of animals as in no way to 
admit of comparison with what it is in man and the crea- 
tures he has domesticated. Every entomologist knows how 



404 OPINIONS OF SOIITHEY, &C. 

indifferent are insects to mutilations that would be instant 
death to a quadruped; Mr. Stoddart, in his entertaining- 
little volume, " Angling Reminiscences," has put it beyond 
all possibility of doubt that fishes feel no hurt from the 
hook. 

231. The doctrine of the immortality of brutes is an ex- 
ceedingly ancient one. The Indian, whose blissful heaven 
consists of exhaustless hunting-grounds, does but reflect from 
the forests of the West, what is thousands of years old in 
the Odyssey: "After him I beheld vast Orion, hunting in 
the meadows of asphodel, beasts which he had killed in the 
desert mountains, having a brazen club in his hands, for- 
ever unbroken." Virgil, in his sixth book, enumerates ani- 
mals seen by ^neas in the kingdom of Pluto; Hercules, 
in Theocritus, finishes the narration of his great exploit of 
slaying the Nemean lion by saying that " Hades received a 
monster soul." The same belief existed among the Druids, 
though doubtless a transplantation from the East; the war- 
rior shades, celebrated in song by the son of Fingal, love all 
the amusements of their youth; they bend the bow, and 
pursue the resuscitated stag. Authors who have left treat- 
ises on the subject are Crocius, Ribovius, Aubry, Gimma, 
&c., and in our own country, Richard Dean, Curate of 
Middleton in 1768. "As brutes," says the latter, "have 
accompanied man in all his capital calamities, (as deluges, 
famines, and pestilences,) so will they attend him in his final 
deliverance." Southey, Lamartine, and Miss Seward have 
written beautiful verses expressing their belief in the immor- 
tality of brutes. The "' Penscellwood Papers" (Bentley, 
1846) may be consulted for an essay to the same purpose; 
Mrs. Jameson's Common-place Book (pp. 207-212) for 
selected opinions; and Bonnet's Pcdingenesie PhilosojoMque; 
Idees sur I'etat .futur des Animaux, (Qiluvres, Tom. vii.) for a 
long and minute argument. Dr. Barclay (Inquiry, &c., p. 



BRUTES NOT IMMORTAL. 405 

399,) pleads that for aught we know, brutes may be immor- 
tal, "reserved as forming many of the accustomed links in 
the chain of being, and by preserving the chain entire, con- 
tribute, in the future state, as they do here, to the general 
beauty and variety of the universe, a source, not only of 
sublime, but of perpetual, delight." It is true that the 
forms of animals will be thus needed ; it is true also that they 
will appear in the scenery of the future world, but it is not 
true that those forms will be there by resurrection from 
earth. 



CHAPTER XXlli. 

THE MESVRItlSCTION A.NJ) THE FUTURE IiIFE. 

232. Concerning no subject of vital interest to the 
human mind are theoretical doctrine and familiar, practical 
belief so widely discrepant, as in regard to that most solemn 
and awful event of human life, the Eesurrection after death. 
We say " of life" because life and immortality, rightly 
viewed, are not two distinct things, any more than time and 
eternity are. Life runs on into immortality, partitioned 
from it only by a thin, dissolving veil of flesh and blood ; 
Time is simply that part of Eternity in which we exist now. 
Man is, not to be immortal. Although the true idea of the 
Eesurrection has been incidentally stated in other places, a 
distinct chapter upon its philosophy and phenomena becomes 
of the highest im^Dortance to our present inquiry. As with 
many other topics, it has been impossible wholly to postpone 
it ; some of what we have now to present in a connected 
form may in consequence want the air of absolute novelty; 
but by concentrating the whole, perhaps even the points 
already touched upon will become more intelligible, and 
thus render the new allusion to them not unwelcome. 

233. Doctrine says the Resurrection is to happen in the 
remote future ; Belief says it occurs simultaneously with 
dissolution. Who ever speaks of a departed friend except 
as having " gone to heaven," that is, of living there as a 
glorified human being, in the enjoyment of every bodily 
member, and every mental faculty and emotion, needful to 

406 



EESURRBCTION IMMEDIATE. 40T 

the realization of celestial happiness? Who ever speaks, 
Ave say, except of their having gone — mark, not as to go, at 
some indefinitely distant period, but as having already and 
absolutely gonef Unwilling as men may be to allow in 
words that the soul is a spiritual body, independent of the 
material body, and capable of complete existence after part- 
ing with the latter ; to believe that the departed is " in 
heaven" is necessarily to believe it ; also to believe in imme- 
diate resurrection, and what is of no less importance, in 
immediate "judgment." In every age has that great unim- 
peachable intuition of the spiritual body, and of its imme- 
diate resurrection, been the faith of sorrowing men. What- 
ever light Scripture may have thrown upon death, to this 
the human heart cleaves with firm, undeviating affection. 
However opposed in other things, in this. Pagan and Chris- 
tian are agreed — death is immediate entrance into the Better 
Land. How beautiful is the monody of the old Greek 
poet — 

" Prote, thou art not dead, but hast removed to a better place, and 
dwellest in the Islands of the Blest, among abundant banquets, 
where thou art delighted, while tripping along the Elysian plains 
amongst soft flowers, far from all ills. The winter pains thee not, 
neither does heat nor disease trouble thee, nor hunger nor thirst ; 
nor is the life of man any longer desired by thee, for thou livest in 
the pure splendor of Olympus." 

Cyrus, on his death-bed, desired the Persians to rejoice at 
his funeral, and not to lament as if he were really dead. 
The Arabs regard it impious to mourn for the deceased, 
" that is," say they, " for those who are with Mahomet in 
Paradise." " Dear Sir," writes Jeremy Taylor to Evelyn, 
in 1656, " I am in some little disorder by reason of the 
death of a little child of mine, a boy that lately made me 
very glad ; but now he rejoices in his little orb, while vv'e 
think and sigh, and long to be as safe as he is." Her^e, 



A MAN DOES NOT REALLY DIE. 

indeed, is the mourner's consolation. When the loved and 
lost are thought of by the calm light of the great and 
sacred truth that " there is a spiritual body," they cease to 
be dead ; their resurrection has already taken place. The 
mind that is in a right state recoils from the chill ideas of 
the coffin, and putrefaction, and inanimateness, and fastens 
on the sweet conviction that the vanished one is alive, and 
in the enjoyment of serenest happiness and rest. It thinks 
of the corjDse in the grave merely as an old garment, conse- 
crated indeed by the loved being who had used it, but of no 
value in itself, and soon to be the dust from which it was 
moulded. Never was there a more lovely illustration of 
this faith than the epitaph on the mother and her infant ih 
the Greenwood Cemetery at New York : " Is it well with 
thee ? Is it well with the child ? And she answered. It is 
well." (2 Kings iv. 26.) That part of the great mystery 
which concerns the souls of little children who die, and their 
development in the future life, is the most pleasing perhaps 
of all for our contemplation. Whether do they remain 
little children, or expand to the full, beautiful, noble human 
stature ? Either way, those who have lost such a one, are 
never without a little child to love and nestle in their 
hearts. The others grow up and become men and women, 
but this one stays with them forever. 

234. In order to a true idea of the Resurrection, it re- 
quires accordingly, first that we should have a true idea of 
what the soul is ; second, a true idea of what constitutes 
Death. The soul, as we have seen above, is no mere ap- 
pendage to man, formless and insubstantial, but man him- 
self Death, as we have also seen, is simply the departure 
of man from his temporal material body, and his conscious- 
ness of the material world ; and entrance upon full con- 
sciousness of the spiritual world. The fundamental truth 
of the whole matter simplifies therefore into this — the dis- 



POPULAR FICTIONS OF BURIAL. 409 

tinctiveness of ourselves from our material bodies. " It is the 
soul," says Hierocles, " that is you, the body that is yours."* 
What we are is one thing, what we have, or some time have 
had, round, about us, is another. We must not confound 
them. It is because they are confounded, that people cannot 
see how the soul can be independent, and live and act sepa- 
rately and apart. As we cast off our clothes at night, and 
wake to the world of visions, so is it at death — we cast off 
our temporary material bodies, which are only so much 
apparel, and become conscious of the world of spirits. A 
man never really dies. A change comes over us, but life is 
never really extinguished, nor for one instant suspended. 
The dead, as we call them, are no more dead than we our- 
selves. Solemn is the thought, but somewhere our departed 
friends are every one of them alive, consciously, vigorously, 
actively alive. 

235. Further, as the soul is the man, and the material 
body only his house while upon earth, a man is never really 
buried. No human being, since the beginning of the world, 
has ever yet been buried, no, not even for a few minutes. 
Buried ! How can a living soul be buried ? Man is where 
his conscious being is, his memory, his love, his imagination ; 
and since these cannot be put into the grave, the' man is 
never put there. So far from being our " last home," the 
grave is not a home at all, for we never are laid in it or go 
near it. " How shall we bury you?" said Crito to Socrates, 
before he drank the poison. " Just as you please," replied 
Socrates, " if only you can catch me !" Socrates knew bet- 
ter than that he should die. He saw through death as a 



* 2v yap £t i] ipvxff rd Si aiijia, aov. Commentaries on the Golden 
Verses of Pythagoras, (Ed. Nfeedham, 1709, p. 114). Many other 
observations of the same tenor occur in this truly philosophical 
writer. 

35 S 



410 TOMBSTONE INSCRIPTIONS. 

vapor curtain, through which he would burst into another 
life. " I shall not die ; I shall never die/' is what every man 
ought to say, and energetically to think. " I shall never 
die; I shall never be buried; bury me if you can catch me!" 
Burying, as commonly spoken of, is a gross, material idea, 
thoroughly vulgar, unpoetical, and unscriptural, the result 
of materialism in theology, and a striking proof of the 
small amount of spirituality current in the popular reli- 
gious creed. To talk of a man being " buried," put into 
the earth, and lying there, while his soul is somewhere else, 
is no less false and illogical to the understanding than it is 
offensive to the feelings. " We ought to rise above the use of 
such base phraseology. We ought even to teach our children, 
from the earliest, that there are no men and women really 
in the grave ; and truly they better understand and receive 
this great truth than many of their elders. How difficult 
to make a child believe that its mother, or father, or bro- 
ther, is below the sods ! And how foolish the efforts some- 
times made to force it to believe the degrading falsehood ! 
Leave it alone to its heaven-born thoughts. Why attempt 
to destroy the being of one who is merely absent to us, 
as we shall all be, ere long, to others ?" The very tomb- 
stone is inscribed falsely. It says " Here lies the body of 

• ." Rather should it be, " Here lies the last of the 

bodies of ," since the body we depart out of at death 

is only the concluding one of a long series, every one of 
them quite as worthy of commemoration. The earth, let us 
remember, too, does not itself open the grave we deem so 
frightful. It is man who digs it, and who peoples it with 
the horror which he charges on it. People talk again of 
the "worms" which devour the dead. Here is another fal- 
sity. Our bodies moulder and decay, but they are not 
eaten. Worms are engendered, not by corruption, but by 
flies, who must lay the eggs from which they issue, and no 



DEAD BODIES ARE CAST OFF GARMENTS. 411 

flies have power to penetrate so far into the earth as the 
depth at which the dead are usually laid. Wrong feeling 
about dead bodies and the grave does more than anything 
else to vitiate religious teaching, to hinder consolation for 
the loss of friends, and in general, to mar faith in immortal- 
ity. Happy the day when all shall learn that the corpses 
of the departed are no more than relinquished garments of 
living men and women — temples of God in which divine 
service is over and finished, the chanting hushed, the aisles 
deserted, and to be contemplated with as little terror and 
revolving as we gaze at the silent ruins of Eivaulx or Tin- 
tern before altogether " wede away" by Time. 

236. The conviction of our departed friends being alive 
in heaven, fashions our own secret expectations. No one 
ever imagines from his heart, that he is to lie indefinitely in 
the earth, but rather that death will be to greet and be 
greeted by old well-known faces, shining in the sweetest 
lineaments of love — that as we were received when as little 
infants we entered this world, with tenderness and afiection, 
so shall we be when as men and women we enter the next ; 
that, in short, all pleasant things and states will immediately 
supervene, the same, yet inexpressibly more bright, all the 
dreams found, and only the sleep lost. It is enough that 
we have a spontaneous hope of it, for the hopes of the heart 
are rarely deceptions. 

My sprightly neighbor, gone before. 
To that unknown and silent shore, 
Shall we not meet as heretofore. 

Some summer morning ? 

When from thy cheerful face, a ray 
Of bliss hath struck across the day, 
A bliss that would not go away, 

A sweet forewarning ? 



412 TRUE AND FALSE EMBLEMS OF DEATH. 

Intuition is worth volumes of logic. " Where, in the plan 
of nature," says the German writer Reimar, " do we find 
instincts falsified ? Where do we see an instance of a crea- 
ture instinctively craving a certain kind of food, in a place 
where no such food can be found ? Are the swallows de- 
ceived by their instinct when they fly away from clouds and 
storms to seek a warmer country? Do they not find a 
milder climate beyond the water ? When the May-flies and 
other aquatic insects leave their shells, expand their wings, 
and soar from the water into the air, do they not find an 
atmosphere fitted to sustain them in a new stage of life? 
Yes. The voice of nature does not utter false prophecies. 
It is the call, the invitation of the Creator addressed to his 
creatures. And if this be true with regard to the impulses 
of physical life, why should it not be true with regard to 
the superior instincts of the soul ?"* 

237. Holding such views in their hearts, and daily read- 
ing the book wherein they are confirmed, is it not strange 
that Christians should use for the symbol of death, the 
unconsoling, not to say disgusting and disheartening, skull 
and cross-bones ? What a Sadducean usage compared with 
the beautiful custom of the ancient Greeks, who, though 
" pagans," saw death imaged rather in the living, glossy, 
Evergreen tree, and planted accordingly, beside their tombs, 
the cypress and the yew. In ancient funeral ceremonies 
were used, for the same reason, branches of myrtle and 
arbutus, as shown by the beautiful allusions in the Electra 
of Euripides, and the 11th book of the ^neid. Certainly 
the former custom is still extant, but not so its intrinsic 
significance, or whence the dull surmises that have been set 
forth to explain its retention ? That which is perennially 



* The Principal Truths of Natural Keligion Defended and Illus- 
trated, in Nine Dissertations. — English Trans., 1766. 



CHEERFULNESS OF DEATH. 413 

fair and cheerful is the true emblem of death; not that 
which is dolorous ; the tree green throughout the winter, and 
the Amaranth, rather than the decaying old bone. How 
elegantly and appropriately the Amaranth is associated with 
immortality by the poets ; and practically, under the name 
of Immortelle, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, is familiar 
to accomplished minds.* No less so the fine similitude of 
life and its interlude of death, presented in those mysterious 
rivers which, like the Guadalquiver, after flowing for some 
distance, lucid and majestic, suddenly hide themselves in 
the ground, but a little further on burst out again, as pure, 
and bright, and grand as ever. It is not a little curious 
that the only personification of death which has come down 
to us from antiquity, represents it as a skeleton dancing to 
the music of the double flute •,'\ the charming old fable of 
the singing of the swan before its death, is but a poetic ren- 
dering of the same idea. Jerome Cardan, the famous phy- 
sician of Milan, in the sixteenth century, concludes his 



* The Amaranth or " Everlasting" is not, as commonly supposed, 
a flower sui generis. There are many species, and even genera of 
flowers which by reason of their juiceless and scariose texture, 
retain their color and form indefinitely. Such are different species 
of Elichrysum, Gnaphalium, &c. among the composites, in which 
family the Amaranths chiefly occur. Oddly enough, the genus 
botanically called Amaranthus, least merits the name. Those who 
would cultivate these beautiful flowers should on no account omit 
Gnaphalium fulgidum, golden ; Aphelexis humilis, crimson ; Rhodanthe 
Manglesii, rose-color and silver ; Ammobium alatum, white ; and 
above all, the incomparable Astelma eximia, resembling clusters of 
ripe raspberries. The chaplets, &c. used at Pere la Chaise are made 
of the Onaphalium Orientate. No garden need be destitute of the 
JEliehrysum braeteatum. 

t On a gem preserved in the Medicean Gallery at Florence, and 
figured in the Musceum Florentinum. Gemmae Antiquse ex Thesauro 
Mediceo, &c. Plate 94, fig. 3. 



414 DREAMS. 

beautiful book on Consolation, with a comparison of death 
to marital love. " Cum itaque stremem agonem anima 
superaverit, tarn quam amans amanti eopulata, ea dulcedine 
ac securitate fruitur, quam nee scribere, nee cogitare possu- 
mus, &c." "When, therefore, thou hast taken thy last 
leave of life, thy soul, like unto a lover embracing his love, 
shall enjoy that sweetness and security Avhich we can neither 
write of nor conceive." — Opera, torn, i., p. 636. This beau- 
tiful composition, the choicest work of its extraordinary 
author, ranks second only to that of Boethius on the same 
subject. 

238. The transplantation of our consciousness, at the 
period of death, from the material to the spiritual world, 
has its image in the suspension of our external senses during 
Sleep, and the wakening of that mysterious sensibility of 
which we become conscious in certain modes of dreaming. 
" We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleep," says 
Sir Thomas Browne. " The slumber of the body seems to 
be but the waking of the soul. It is the ligation of sense, 
but the liberty of reason." 

Strange state of being ! For 'tis still to be ; 
Senseless to feel, and with seal'd eyes to see. 

Doubtless the majority of dreams are what Macnish asserts 
all to be, namely, "the resuscitation of thoughts which in 
some shape or other have previously occupied the mind." 
Experience and revelation attest, however, that at times, 
the struggles of the chained spirit to employ, and thus to 
enjoy itself amid the glories of its proper clime, are not in 
vain. Such are the occasions when strange, beautiful pic- 
tures open out before our sleeping sight, rich in all the 
colors and reality of life. It will be said that these are 
creations of the imagination. Probably, so. But then what 
is this imagination?" Barely to assign a phenomenon to the 



DREAMS. 415 

"imagination" is to get no nearer to its cause. It is to evade 
the question, rather than to resolve it. The "imagination," 
as usually referred to in suck matters, is just one of those 
useful entrenchments behincTwhich perplexity is apt to 
shelter itself, and nothing more. The imagination belongs 
less to the material than to the spiritual world; or at least, 
it is like the Janus hifrons of the Roman mythology, — pro- 
vided with a twofold face and senses. What the populace 
say about imagination presenting images that we mistake 
for realities, is like popular philosophy in general, pure 
nonsense. No man ever imagined or can imagine anything 
that has not reality somewhere, and this whether waking or 
sleeping. That which we call imagination in reference to 
dreams is what in the day-time we call our poetic faculty, — 
and probably the play of each is in definite ratio to the 
other — the prime characteristic of the faculty being unswerv- 
ing allegiance to Truth and fact, and one of its chief privi- 
leges, insight into the spiritual world. In sleep we are con- 
scious of beholding objects as distinctly, and hearing sounds 
as plainly, as in our waking state, yet with an eye and ear 
wholly different from the outward organs; and which can 
have reference therefore only to a sphere of nature and 
mode of being likewise entirely different, a sphere which can 
be no other than the Spiritual world. Dreams, in a word, 
rank with the highest phenomena of the spiritual life. 
"Dreams," says Addison, "give us some idea of the great 
excellence of a human soul, and its independency of matter. 
They are an instance of that agility and perfection which is 
natural to the soul when disengaged from the body. When 
the organs of sense want their due repose and necessary 
reparation, and the body is no longer able to keep pace with 
that spiritual substance to which it is united, the soul exalts 
herself in her several faculties, and continues in action until 



416 PERMANENCE OP THE MEMORY. 

her partner is again qualified to bear her company. Dreams 
look like the amusements and relaxations of the soul when 
she is disencumbered of her machine; her sports and 
pastimes when she has laid her charge asleep." Bishop 
Newton's remarks on dreams are little less than argumenta- 
tive for the spiritual body. " It is very evident," he writes, 
"that the soul is in great measure independent of the body, 
even while she is within the body; since the deepest sleep 
that possesseth the one cannot affect the other. While the 
avenues of the body are closed, the soul is still endued with 
sense and perception, and the impressions are often stronger, 
and the images more lively, when we are asleep than when 
awake. They must necessarily be two distinct and different 
substances, whose nature and properties are so very different 
that while the one shall sink under the burden and fatigue 
of the day, the other shall still be fresh and active as the 
flame ; while the one shall be dead to the world, the other 
shall be ranging the universe." Lord Brougham's Dis- 
course of Natural Theology contains reasoning to the same 
effect, and almost in the same words. A most clever and 
interesting little book on this subject, and one which nobody 
curious in the phenomena of man's inner life should fail to 
peruse, is Sheppard's "On Dreams, in their Mental and 
Moral Aspects, 1847." 

239. But leaving aside such dreams as those alluded to, 
even the ordinary kind claim to originate in a spiritual 
activity, similarly concurrent with the ligation of external 
sense. For "the resuscitation of thoughts which in some 
shape or other have previously occupied the mind," is 
nothing more or less than a prelude to what will unques- 
tionably form a chiqf part of our intellectual experience of 
futurity; namely, the inalienable and irrepressible recollec- 
tion of the deeds and feelings played forth while in the 



PERMANENCE OF THE MEMORY. 417 

flesh, providing a beatitude or a misery forever.* Ordi- 
narily, this resuscitation is of such a medley and jumbled 
charactei', that not only is the general product unintelli- 
gible, but the particular incidents are themselves too frag- 
mentary and dislocated to be recognized. But it is not 
always so. There must be few who have not experienced in 
their sleep, with what peculiar vividness, unknown to their 
waking hours, and with what minute exactitude of portrai- 
ture, events long past and long lost sight of, will not infre- 
quently come back, showing that there is a something within 
which never forgets, and which only waits the negation of 
the external world, to leap up and certify its powers. 

O, wondrous Dreamland! who hath not 

Threaded some mystic maze 
In its dim retreats, and lived again 

In the light of other days? 
* * * -X- 

There the child is on its mother's breast 

That long in the grave hath lain, 
For in Dreamland all the loved and lost 

Are given us again. 

In the whole compass of poetry, perhaps there is nothing 
more touching than the allusion in the Exile of Erin : — 



* Martineau carries out this view, in a piece of great power, in 
the "Endeavors after the Christian Life." Vol. 1. Coleridge, in 
Biographia Literaria, (vol. 1, p. 115. Ed. 1817,) suggests that the 
"books" which are to be opened at the last day, are men's own per- 
fect memories of what they have thoiaght and done during life. In 
relation to the quickening of the memory at death, it is full of 
solemn interest that persons so nearly drowned as to lose all con- 
sciousness, and all sense of physical pain, see, during the moments 
preceding their restoration, the whole of their past life in mental 
panorama. Of this there are many well known instances on record. 
Forgetting, absolute forgetting, asserts De Quincey, is a thing not 
possible to the human mind. 



418 DREAMS AND PHYSICAL HEALTH. 

Erin ! my country, though sad and forsaken, 
In dreams I revisit thy sea-beaten shore ; 
But alas ! in a far foreign land I awaken, 
And sigh for the friends I shall never see more ! 

That which so vividly remembers is the Soul ; and if in the 
sleep which refreshes our organic nature, it utters its recol- 
lections but brokenly and indistinctly, it will abundantly 
compensate itself when the material vesture which clogs it 
shall be cast away. Much of the indistinctness of dreams 
probably arises from physical unhealthiness. If a sound 
body be one of the first requirements to a sound mind, in 
relation to its Avaking employments, no less must it be need- 
ful to the sanity and precision of its sleeping ones. Brilliant 
as are the powers and functions of the spiritual body, the 
performance of them, whether sleeping or waking, so long 
as it is investured with flesh and blood, is immensely, per- 
haps wholly, contingent on the health of the material body. 
If the material body be improperly fed, or the blood be in- 
sufiiciently oxygenated, the brain and nerves are imperfectly 
nourished, and the spiritual body can but imperfectly enact 
its wills. However little it may be suspected, the great 
13ractical question of our day, the health of towns, thus in- 
volves, to a less or greater extent, the moral and intellectual 
interests of the community. For a soul that is debarred 
from acting freely and vigorously, through a defective or 
vitiated condition of its instrument, cannot be expected to 
act nobly and religiously. 

240. To enter the spiritual world, or rather, to become 
conscious of it, requires no long journey. Man, as already 
observed, is from • his birth an inhabitant of it. Wherever 
there are material substances and material worlds, there 
likewise is the spiritual universe. Could we be transported 
to the most distant star that the telescope can descry, we 
should not be a hair's breadth nearer to it than we are at 



NEARNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 419 

this moment, nor should we be a hair's breadth more distant 
from it. So far from being infinitely remote and uncon- 
nected, as vulgarly supposed, the invisible or spiritual world 
is immediately contiguous. It circumferences us like the 
air we breathe. It is only to unintelligence that it is dis- 
tant, and thus, like the Beautiful, at once quite close, and 
far away. It is near to our souls, which alone have concern 
with it, as the sweet kiss of true love ; far from our bodies 
as such love is from the vicious. The notion that heaven 
is somewhere beyond the stars, a country on the convex 
side of the firmament, merely an elevated part of space, has 
long since been neutralized by the discoveries of Astronomy 
alone. "Above" the physical earth, and "below" it, are 
conditions which are changing every moment. If heaven 
be above our heads at noon, it is beneath our feet at mid- 
night. The blue, radiant, infinite sky is the material emblem 
of heaven, but heaven itself lies nowhere in material space, 
because it does not belong to such space. This is the very 
letter of Scripture. "When the shepherds were watching 
their flocks on the eve of the nativity, the angels had no 
long distance to traverse in order to come into view. They 
were not seen first as a bright speck in the sky, gradually 
taking shape as they drew nearer. They were beheld "sud- 
denly," indicating that they were close by all the while, and 
that for them to be seen it was merely needful that the 
spiritual eyes of the shepherds should be opened. It was 
"suddenly" also that Moses and Elias disappeared after 
they had been seen on the mount of the Transfiguration ; 
implying a similar closing of the spiritual eyes of the three 
disciples. So when "the angel of God called to Hagar out 
of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee, Hagar?" 
the words could have been uttered in no distant realm, or 
they would have been inaudible. At death, accordingly, 
there is no migration to some distant region of space; the 



420 DISCLOSITEES OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 

avenue to our eternal abode is simply the casting oflE" the 
"flesh and blood" which "cannot inherit" it, and heaven 
and hell are near and distant according to each man's moral 

state. 

Death, ia another life. We bow our heads 
At going out, we think, and enter straight 
Another golden chamber of the King's, 
Larger than this, and lovelier. — Festus, 

241. What are the landscape features of that "golden 
chamber," of course we cannot know till we enter it, " neither 
hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive." But 
the- inspiration which promises it says also that "the invisible 
things of God are clearly seen by the things which are made," 
signifying that the splendors of fiiturity, though in their 
fullness unimaginable, are nevertheless pictured in those of 
earth. Heaven is the permanent ecdo:; of creation ; earth is 
its dim ecdcoXou. The spiritual world is the universe of the 
essence of things ; the material one is the theatre of their 
finited presentation; to such extent, and in such variety, 
that is, as it is necessary or desirable that man should know 
them during his time-life. Doubtless there are millions of 
spiritual things which are never ultimated into material 
effigies, but reserved as the privilege of the angels. Yet 
whatever we do see that is excellent and lovely, we may be 
sure is a counterpart of something in every sense celestial. 
The flowers of the spring yearly delight us by their return, 
because of prototypes in the spiritual world which are im- 
mortal, though their material emblems, like the beautiful 
Dissolving Views, come but to flee away; and tried by the 
Sensational standard of the real, seem to be gone and lost 
forever. The rose seems to wither, its petals scatter, and its 
loveliness is only a recollection ; but the real rose can never 
perish. The real rose abides where it always was, in the 



VISIONS OF THE FUTURE LIFE. 421 

spiritual world; and there it will subsist for ever; and when 
we cast off our own leaves, we shall find it there in all its 
deathless beauty, along with all the other loved and vanished. 
God takes care of all that is truly beautiful and precious, 
and reserves it for us, provided we will go and take posses- 
sion. We have but to cross the dark river confident in its 
trustworthiness, and we shall not be disappointed. God 
loves to be trusted. Then, too, we shall behold the spiritual 
sea, and islands, and rivers, and sun, and stars, and trees, 
just as St. John beheld them when God opened his eyes so 
that he might tell us of them in the Apocalypse, and as we 
continually express our own personal hope in respect of, in 
that beautiful anticipative hymn beginning 

There is a land of pure delight, 
and proceeding — 

There everlasting spring abides. 

And never-withering flowers ; 
* * * * 

Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood 

Stand dressed in living green.* 

"We all came into the world for something ; we shall all go 



* Other scenes in nature may be grander, but lovelier there are 
none than the view, on a fair summer morning, from the eastern 
shores of the upper part of the Bristol Channel. Seated on the 
thymy hills of happy Clevedon, sloping so delicately to the edge of 
the wild, seaweed-mantled crags, upon whose feet the impetuous 
waves, dashing and tossing, seem never weary of flinging their 
white beauty — as we gaze upon the opposite coast, the picture in 
these verses is completely and most exquisitely realized. There 
rolls the "swelling flood;" there lie the "sweet fields beyond," 
dressed in their " living green," and dotted with hamlets and white 
cottages which show conspicuous in the bright revealing sun. Borne 
to this beautiful presence, the heart learns how to understand the 
heavenly Jordan, and swells Avith new delight of pious hope. 



422 THE PRESENT LIFE NOT TO BE SLIGHTED. 

out of it for more ; just as when daylight is exchanged for 
starlight, we lose our consciousness of the terrestrial iu the 
superber consciousness of the universal. 

Mysterious Night ! when our first parent knew 
Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name, 
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame. 

This glorious canopy of light and blue ? 

Yet, 'neath a curtain of translucent dew. 

Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus, with the host of heaven came, 

And lo ! creation widened in man's view. 

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed 
Within thy beams, O Sun ? or who could find, 

Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed, 
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind? 

Why do we, then, shun death with anxious strife ? 

If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life ? 

242. But, because of these prospects, we are not to think 
slightingly of the present life and its arena. Each sphere 
of being is divine, for each is the work of God, and if not 
felt sacred, it is the observer that is in fault. Many think 
that because heaven, which is the sunny part of the spiritual 
world, is above all places holy, therefore the material world, 
this earth, is vile — the devil's kingdom. Not so. The 
world, properly regarded, is God's kingdom, not the devil's. 
Hell only is the devil's kingdom. True, Jesus said, " My 
kingdom is not of this world." But it is quite wrong to in- 
fer from this, as many do, that he neither felt any interest 
in it himself, nor desired that man should feel any. To 
fancy our Lord to have promulgated Christianity upon 
earth solely mth a view to man's fiiture happiness in hea- 
ven, is one of the fatalest errors we can fall into. The true 
office of religion is to teach us so to live in this world, and 
so to enjoy it, that we must needs live in and enjoy the 



"MY KINGDOM IS NOT OF THIS WORLD." 423 

other. " If thou wilt rightly understand and love eternity, 
learn properly to understand and love terrestrial life. The 
true preparation for heaven is to learn what we have on 
earth, and to be glad in it." To say that there is " nothing 
true but heaven," that all below is unworthy a wish or 
thought, is the very opposite to what Christ really taught. 
Certainly, the world we live in is full of trials and deceitful- 
ness, and blessed is the promise of solace and compensation 
in a brighter sphere ; but it is God's world still, therefore 
abounding in good and beauty, and impossible to be all 
worthlessness and illusion. The tendency to neglect and 
too little appreciate the advantages of the present life, en- 
couraged by the incessant dwelling by many of our spiritual 
teachers on the prospects of the life to come, is a result 
which every thinking Christian man cannot but deplore; 
for that cannot be a true spirit of Christianity which deems 
our beautiful world a mere "vale of tears," the mere pas- 
sage to a better, or which thanks God not so much for what 
he has already given, as for what we consider we are and 
ought, to receive. What our Lord really meant in those 
memorable words, " My kingdom,"&c., was, that he came to 
introduce an order of things based on other principles en- 
tirely than those of the humanly constituted kingdoms then 
existing — principles of love, charity and mercy, instead of 
selfishness, cruelty and aggression. Hence the angels sang 
not only Glory to God in the highest, but on earth, peace 
and good-will. There is something truly grand in the spec- 
tacle of a man in the enjoyment of health, prosperity, and 
reputation, looking forward nevertheless to a future life, 
with hope and thankfulness. Far more admirable, how- 
ever, is the spectacle of him who feels this hope and thank- 
fulness, not by reason of dissatisfaction with the world, but 
by reason of its ministry to him of wisdom and delight. 
" The fact," says a great and original writer, " that the sky 



424 FANATICISM AND TERRBSTRIALISM. 

is brighter than the earth is not a precious truth unless the 
earth itself be first understood. Despise the earth, or slan- 
der it, fix your eyes on its gloom, and forget its loveliness, 
and we do not thank you for your languid or despairing 
perception of brightness in heaven. But rise up actively on 
the earth, learn what there is in it, know its color and form, 
and the full measure and make of it, and Avhen after that, 
you say ' heaven is bright,' it will be a precious truth, but 
not till then." (Ruskin, Modern Painters, iv. 39.) Con- 
stant dwelling upon death and what will follow it, too often 
confounded with religion, and even mistaken for it, is not 
only not healthful to the soul, but injurious. True, the way 
to live pleasantly is to learn to die hopefully ; " fine ideas," 
says Goethe, " must needs fill the soul that in any way out- 
steps the boundaries of terrestrial life ;" but we must not 
think only of dying ; it is much more religious to seek to 
preserve our life as we possibly can, and to exert ourselves 
as far as strength and opportunity will permit, than to 
estrange ourselves from God's gifts. Anything which too 
powerfully attracts us away from the duties of the present 
life, cannot be regarded as beneficial. While here, the 
living should belong to life, and adapt themselves to it. 
God has shown us that it is his will that we should do so, 
by withholding from us every clue as to the time of our de- 
parture. A truly noble soul loves both heaven and earth, 
falling neither into fanaticism nor terrestrialism. The func- 
tions of our temporal life are as noble in their degree as 
those of eternity can be. Our relations to God can never 
be more intimate or grand. " It is a poor mistake to think 
that we compliment God's heaven by despising his earth, 
and that we best show our sense of the great things the fu- 
ture man will do yonder, by counting as utterly worthless 
all that the present man can do here." 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE ANALOGIES OF JVATUJiE—I,A.W OF PItJEFIGTTJiATIOm 

243. A TRUE philosophy of Life includes the great phe- 
nomena of Analogy. In order, therefore, to the comple- 
tion of our subject, it is proper that they should receive an 
independent and methodical consideration, over and above 
the passing allusions that have from time to time been made. 
Analogy as it exists among natural objects and appearances, 
is not, as often supposed, mere casual and superficial resem- 
blance, though it is perfectly true that such resemblance 
exists. It is a part of the very method, order, and consti- 
tution of things. The evidence of the Unity of creation 
resides in its analogies ; in these also we realize the noblest 
and most ennobling knowledge that is open to us after Scrip- 
tural truth, namely, the dual glory and blessedness of our 
position in the universe, or as regards Nature on the one 
hand, below, and God upon the other hand, above. Lord 
Bacon, who calls them the " respondences" of Nature, fully 
alive to their value, thus urgently enforces it in the Ad- 
vancement of Learning. "Neither," says he, "are those of 
which we have spoken, and others of like nature, mere 
resemblances (as men of narrow observation may possibly 
imagine), but one and the very same seals and footsteps of 
Nature, impressed upon various subjects and objects. 
Hitherto this branch of science hath not been cultivated as 
it ought. In the writings emanating from the profounder 
class of wits you may find examples thinly and sparsely in- 

36 » 425 



426 ANALOGY AND COKRESPONDENCE. 

serted, for the use and illustration of the argument, but a 
complete body of these axioms no one hath yet prepared ; 
though they have a primitive force and efficacy in all science, 
and are of such consequence as materially to conduce to the 
understanding of the Unity of Nature ; which latter we con- 
ceive to be the office and use of Philosophia Prima." All 
philosophy goes to establish this high claim. No portion of 
Nature is truly intelligible till its analogies with the other 
portions are investigated and applied ; the man who disre- 
gards them can never be more than a sectarian, while he 
who uses them — not in the way of a trifler, as the end of 
his inquiries, but as a philosopher, for their efficacy as a 
means — proves that it is they alone which can render the^ 
mind cosmopolitan, and truly instruct us in the arcana of 
creation. A man may be a very good chemist, as to ac- 
quaintance with salts and acids ; he may be a very good 
botanist, as concerns the names and uses of plants ; but this 
is only to be a savant ; he is no philosopher till he can gather 
new insight into his chemistry or his botany by virtue of its 
analogies with other shapes of truth, and feel the centrality, 
as to essentials, of every science. For the true analogist, 
wherever he may be, however he may shift his standing 
ground, always finds himself in the middle of nature, his 
particular object for the time being, the clue and text-book 
to the whole. The characteristic of the true philosopher is 
his large consciousness of what is proper to the race in 
general, and of the varied circumstances which pertain to 
its expression in the individual. Analogy as it exists in the 
world of material nature, or as we are now treating of it, 
must not be confounded with Correspondence. "Corre- 
spondence," in the strict and proper sense of the word, and 
as ordinarily used in this volume, denotes ■ the relation of 
the material and objective, to the spiritual and invisible, 
that is to say, the relation of inmost Cause to outermost 



ANALOGY AND CORRESPONDENCE. 427 

Effect, all causes belonging primarily to the spiritual world 
and the phenomena of material nature being so many final 
effects of them, as shown in our chapter upon this subject. 
Correspondence, accordingly, can properly be spoken only 
of that first, governing analogy of the universe which in- 
volves the relation of a prior principle to a posterior, of a 
noumenon to a phenomenon, or vice versa. The analogies 
of the material world are secondary, and are not correspond- 
ences. They are analogies of one natural effect with another 
natural effect; of one natural cause with another natural 
cause, and so forth ; while Correspondences rest on the rela- 
tions, not of two natural things to one another, but of 
natural things to spiritual things. 

244. The value of the study of analogy, even in its sim- 
plest applications, is impossible to be over-rated. There is 
not a single science from which difiiculties have not been 
removed by the certainties of a kindred science, when ana- 
logically compared with it, or which, on similar comparison, 
does not furnish new hints and illustrations. " It is curious," 
remarks Sir David Brewster, tacitly vouching for this prin- 
ciple, "how the conjectures in one science are sometimes 
converted into truths by the discoveries in another." Struc- 
tures, forms, and phenomena, moreover, which are incom- 
prehensible, considered locally and specifically, and which 
often seem positively useless and incongruous, become, by 
reference to a higher synthesis, based on an extended and 
philosophic consideration of analogies, not only comprehen- 
sible, but fraught with meaning of the finest order. Such, 
for example, are the organs which in man seem meaningless 
mimicry of the female bosom. Viewed by the light of 
analogy, there is nothing in the world either capricious or 
inconsistent. The mistake which too often prevents the full 
realization of the use of analogy, and tends even to en- 
gender distrust and prejudice, is the waywardness which so 



428 GENERALIZATION THE BASIS OF PHILOSOPHY. 

commonly persists in contrasting that which is highest with 
that which is lowest — the extremes, in a word — and rejecting 
all that lies between as anomalous. Relations, like causes, 
that are not immediate, are discovered by such as are inter- 
mediate. When divested of the arbitrary disguises with 
which fancy may choose to clothe them, the highest and the 
lowest reflect each other's looks, and a common brotherhood 
becomes everywhere apparent. Because of this grand con- 
sanguinity of all knowledge, arising from the unity, of 
nature, comes also the lofty opinion which the votaries of 
any particular department entertain of it. To the geologist 
there is nothing nobler than geology; to the chemist than 
chemistry ; to the florist than floriculture. Each man feels 
the throbbing of the mighty heart, and, like the true analo- 
gist, seems to himself to stand in the middle. 

245. Analogy accordingly, true, inductive, poetic analogy, 
constitutes the highest exercise of philosophy, "the science," 
as Adam Smith well defines it, "of the connecting principles 
of nature." Not that perception of analogies is itself philo- 
sophy, but that all true philosophy rests on large and bril- 
liant generalization, the means to this latter being fine and 
lively aptitude for the former. " The excellence of a philo- 
sophy," says Ruskin, " consists in the breadth of its harmony, 
or the number of truths it has been able to reconcile." 
That powerful capacity of abstraction which seizing the 
points of agreement in a number of otherwise dissimilar in- 
dividuals, marshals the related, and separates the alien, is in 
fact, the highest prerogative of the human mind. "To 
generalize," says Mackay, " to discover unity in multiplicity, 
order in apparent confusion ; to separate from the accidental 
and the transitory, the stable and universal ; this is the great 
aim of human Reason." Not only is it the strongest evi- 
dence of Intellectual greatness. " The tendency to connect 
and harmonize everything is one of the eminent conditions 



TRUE IDEA OF GENIUS. 429 

of a mind leaning to virtue and beauty, just as the tendency 
to dismember and separate everything is that of a mind 
leaning to vice and ugliness." The finest part of Originality 
is combination, or the power of generalizing and uniting, 
discovering new harmonies among familiar elements, and 
showing us gracefully and eloquently how to see them for 
ourselves. Originality therefore, instead of being, as many 
suppose, nearly exhausted, instead of becoming rarer, will 
become grander every day, and go on delighting us forever, 
seeing that with increase of facts and principles to generalize 
and comhmQ, pari passu will there be scope for the power of 
generalizing. Essentially, this great power is innate and 
intuitional; hence it is classed by Plato with the divine or 
Promethean gifts. Forming, as it does, an integral and vital 
part of "Genius," or that which we are born with, if genius 
be acknowledged a boon from heaven, the part must of ne- 
cessity be of the same origin as the whole, and the sage of 
the Academian garden be in the right. All men are com- 
petent to it, for all men's intuitions are alike, however dif- 
ferent may be their development into living force under the 
influence of education and self-culture. Genius is not so 
rare as many suppose. Let a man assiduously apply him- 
self to Nature and Analogies, and he will find in his own 
heart, however unexpectedly, hidden stores of the envied 
power, ready to burst into life-like seeds. The achievements 
of genius, even the very highest of them, come not of 
something peculiar to the man, but of something common to 
all men. The man of genius, restrictively so called, does but 
set forth, clearly and beautifully, what all the world knows 
already, and what every true reader of him feels to be 
equally his own. Other people differ from him not as being 
ignorant, but as having their knowledge confused, vague, 
and inarticulate. This is the reason why in the land where 
a great genius lived and wrote, we always feel at home. 



430 PKINCIPLE OF PEEFIGURATIOlSr. 

Though we may never have quitted our own shores, reading 
Virgil we feel that our native soil is beyond the Apennines. 
To the Englishman who loves him, Goethe makes Germany 
England ; to the German who has a heart, Shakspere makes 
England Germany. Generalization, accordingly, is not to 
be deemed purely a gift, a power vain to aspire to ; what is 
intuitive, even in the greatest, is simply the capacity to gene- 
ralize. Whatever its particular bent, genius cannot do 
without study and culture, and these will often lift a man to 
the level of the reputed "Genius." In no department of 
life do men rise to eminence who have not undergone a long 
and diligent preparation; for whatever be the difference in 
the mental powers of individuals, it is the cultivation of them 
that alone leads to distinction. Though few may even by 
culture be able to express, all can in some measure learn to 
feel and understand. This, if nothing further is in the 
power and will of every man, and peculiarly of the analogist. 
He may begin where he pleases; Nature has everywhere a 
portico ; Truth, like the world, is a sphere ; dig wherever we 
may, we shall surely come to the centre if we dig deep 
enough. 

246. That Nature is a magnificent Unity has long been 
perceived ; also that its parts form a vast Chain or series, 
beginning with the atom of dust, and extending through 
minerals, plants, and animals up to man. Associated with 
these great principles, and springing out of them, is a third, 
the beautiful principle of Prefiguration. Everything in 
nature is a sign of something higher and more living than 
itself, to follow in due course, and in turn announce a yet 
higher one, the mineral foretells the plant, the plant fore- 
tells the animal, all things in their degree foretell mankind. 
"Nature," says Henry Sutton, "before she developes the 
human being, prophesies of that her grand and ultimate 
performance, and gives pictures and shows of her unborn 



NO MIMICRY IN NATURE. 431 

man-child, hinting at him, and longing and trying to realize 
him, before the time has come for his actual appearance." 
As the Poet is not of one nature, but of Two, one concerned 
with the present, the other reaching forwards into the future, 
so is it with the phenomena and forms of Life. Over and 
above their ordinary present use and meaning, they tell of 
other and greater things to come, anticipating them, and 
pointing to them. Ordinarily, the resemblances subsisting 
between the three kingdoms of nature are deemed mimicries ; 
the higher manifestation is said to be "imitated" by the 
lower one, the phenomena of the vegetable being a degrada- 
tion or humble copy of those of the animal, and those of the 
mineral world a degradation of those of the plant. This is 
wrong altogether; it is viewing the column as commencing 
with the capital, and ending with the pedestal. Properly 
understood, there is no such thing as mimicry in nature; it 
is an inverted mode of observation that makes it seem as if 
there were; the motto is everywhere Excelsior: the like- 
nesses are not those of the living, smiling child and the 
wooden doll, but of the artist's pencilled outline and finished 
picture in colored oils. "In the inferior orders of creation 
it is not that the lamp of vitality is going out, but that we 
catch the first kindlings of that spark wdiich glows with so 
noble a flame in the Aristotles, the Newtons, the Miltons, 
of our heaven-gazing race." So full of interest are these 
prefigurations, so serviceable to a right conception both of 
the unity and of the chain of nature, that it will be best for 
them to receive our first consideration, letting the former 
and greater truths come after. None of these matters, it 
may be hinted, are for closet study; they concern nature as 
it flows fresh and immaculate from God, and only by con- 
versance with nature can they be justly apprehended. The 
man who would be truly instructed in her ways must seek 



432 PREFIGURATIONS OF THE MINERAL KINGDOM. 

them, not by pursuit of his fancy in a chair, but with his 
eyes abroad. 

247. The Mineral kingdom, as the common basis of ma- 
terial nature, is also the first seat of prefiguration, which 
begins in the beautiful objects known as Crystals, including 
both the minerals proper, as the amethyst, lapis-lazuli, and 
emerald, and the infinite variety of chemical salts, as sul- 
phate of copper, prussiate and bichromate of potash. These, 
in the symmetry of their forms, the purity and often trans- 
lucent brightness of their colors, and their clustered mode 
of growth, give'promise of the flowers of the plant, and are 
the blossoms of inorganic nature. Many substances in crys- 
talizing, so dispose themselves as to predict the branching 
and general arrangement of the stems and foliage of plants. 
This we may see in native silver and native copper, which 
frequently assume most beautiful arborescent and frondose 
figures. In the freezing of water it is shown so strikingly, 
that while it transports the true lover of nature with de- 
light, even the dullest are attracted and pleased by it. The 
delicate silvery lace-work on the window-panes on frosty 
mornings is something more than a pretty accident. By no 
means a mere lusiis naturce, (a very unmeaning expression,) 
not without a cause do we find it anticipating the forms of 
certain mosses, as those of the genus Hypnum, and in par- 
ticular the soft, feathery Hypnum proliferum of sylvan path- 
ways, giving not only the contour, but the very size. Nature 
places it there because in her least as well as greatest works 
there is nothing so incongenial as an abrupt beginning, and 
nothing so grateful as to sound a "herald voice" of coming 
glory. Certain sea-weeds are prefigured by the frost-work 
no less strikingly than the mosses ; in the Ptilota plumosa we 
have a remarkably beautifiil instance, every pinnule of this 
charming plant ramifying at a given angle, and originating 
smaller ones of the same character. Sometimes the tracery 



PREFIGUREMENTS OF VEGETABLE FORMS. 433 

is curvilinear Instead of angular, when it points to the 
luxuriant wavy leaves of the Acanthus, as chiselled for the 
crown of the Corinthian pillar. No branches of trees, or 
foliage, however graceful, can exceed the freedom and 
variety with which these lines are drawn. In other cases, 
when curved and frondose, they foreshadow the rounded 
masses that give such richness to the umbrageous elm 
and courtly chestnut. Jones of Nayland gives plates of 
some of the latter varieties in his Philosojyhical Disquisi- 
tions (p. 244). Scheuchzer, in that curious old book, the 
Herbarium Diluvianum (tab. 8, p. 40,) figures a specimen 
of another variety, singularly presignificant of the club- 
moss, or Lycopodium clavatum, formed, he tells us, on the 
inner surface of a glass globe in his museum, during the 
severe winter of 1709. Prefigurements of vegetable forms 
occur likewise on the pavement in winter mornings, deco- 
rating it even in the heart of foggy towns, with graceful 
arching sprays in basso relievo of brown ice. In their earlier 
stages these remind us of the foot-prints of the sea-gulls 
upon the sand. On the surface of very shallow water, as at 
the bottom of tubs, congelation not seldom repeats, on a 
grand scale, small portions of the flowerage of the window- 
panes. The prefiguration is then of the larger pinnate- 
leaved ferns, as the Polypodium aureum, especially as they 
appear when pressed and dried for the Hortus Siccus. In 
fossil ferns, from these latter having more the appearance of 
drawings, we may observe it more plainly still.* In the 
animal kingdom these forms are recapitulated in the flat, 
white, pectinated skeletons of such fishes as the sole; just as 



* An extraordinary example, singularly like the Pecopteris gigan- 
tea, occurred on the premises of the author, during the intense frost 
of February, 1855. The pinnae were fourteen inches long, and the 
entire ice-leaf five feet in circumference. 
.37 T 



434 SNOW CRYSTALS. 

the angles and geometrical nicety of the proportions of 
single crystals, reappear in the honeycomb of the bee, and 
the hexagonal facets of insects' eyes. The stems of plants, 
or at least those of exogenous structure, are prefigured in 
that curious stalactitic variety of sulphate of baryta, called 
in Derbyshire "petrified oak." The horizontal section of 
this mineral, when polished, presents a rich brown, circular 
disk, and gives an exact picture of the concentric rings and 
medullary rays. Flowers are foretold again in Snow. 
Walking over the white mantle of mid-winter, we little 
think that at every step we annihilate a tiny garden. But 
so it is. Scattered over the surface of snow are innumerable 
glittering spangles, composed of six minute icicles, spreading 
starlike from a centre, the rays themselves often provided 
with smaller, secondary filaments, so as to resemble micro- 
scopic feathers. In the less developed stage we see Nature 
planning in them such of the lilies and other flowers of 
Endogens as when expanded are flat and radiate, the Orni- 
thogalum unhellatum, or Star of Bethlehem, for instance: in 
the latter or more developed stage they are harbingers of 
that daiaty little blossom of the Canadian woods, the 
Mitella nuda, the petals of which are fimbriated and of the 
purest white. In the animal kingdom, the idea culminates 
in the star-fishes. The beauty of these unregarded little 
diamonds of the snow, though lost upon most men, has long 
been a delight to quick observers. Descartes gives rude 
drawings of them in the Meteora, and the ingenious but un- 
fortunate microscopist, Robert Hooke, in his Micrographia. 
(Plate viii., 1675.) Dr. Grew, author of that immortal 
work, the Anatomy of Plants, contributed a paper upon 
them to the Philosophical Transactions for 1673, and there 
is a notice of them somewhere by Linnseus. It remained 
however for Scoresby, the arctic voyager, to point out their 
astonishing variety. His figures amount to nearly a hundred. 



IMPORTANCE OF LITTLE THINGS. 435 

and look as if designed from a kaleidoscope, all referable, 
nevertheless, to the common six-rayed star as their funda- 
mental form. It is from these figures that the Cyclopsedias 
and Galleries of Nature have all copied. The impression 
commonly entertained that the large diversity found by 
Scoresby in the Polar regions belongs only to such latitudes, 
is not correct. In the "Illustrated London News" for 
February, 1855, and again in the "Art Journal" for March, 
1857, there are drawings by Mr. Glaisher, of the Greenwich 
Observatory, of no less than thirty-two varieties discovered 
in his own neighborhood, and doubtless many more may be 
found, and in any part of the country, if diligently sought, 
providing a Christmas and New-year's pleasure for the in- 
telligent such as will outweigh whole nights of the mere 
temporicide popularly esteemed the beau-ideal of winter 
pastime. They were no common eyes that first espied the 
snow-flowers. Most men can see large things, but it takes 
clever ones to see the little. Nor were they common minds. 
To take the simple, the homely, the unheeded, and show 
mankind how to find in it a source of new, rational, and un- 
sophisticated enjoyment, is not the least of the benign func- 
tions that belong to Genius. To learn how to see and de- 
light in little things as well as large, is in fact, to make no 
slight progress both in true intelligence and in aptitude for 
genuine pleasure. Many laugh at the idea of being pleased 
with little things. "Little things," they say, "please little 
minds." They should remember that the great mass of the 
population of our planet consists of the merest pigmies, 
diminutive birds and fishes, tiny insects, animalcules only 
visible with a microscope, so that to turn away from little 
things is to be indifierent to almost everything the world 
contains. Besides, with Uranus eighty times greater than 
the whole earth, Neptune a hundred and fifty times greater, 
Saturn more than seven hundred times, and Jupiter more 



436 PKEFIGURATION IN PLANTS. 

than fourteen hundred, it is rather inconsistent to talk about 
littleness in the objects of a world itself so puny. 

248. The enterprise of plants is one of the most wonder- 
fiil things in nature. Irrespectively of their immense pre- 
significance of Animal life, which infinitely exceeds that of 
the mineral world with regard to the vegetable, there is a 
continual and ardent emulation of all higher parts and 
forms by those which in function or development are lower. 
Leaves, for example, which, as we all know, are ordinarily 
of some shade of green, in many species paint themselves 
with the most vivid and beautiful colors. The leaves of 
several kinds of Amaranthus, as the Prince's-feather and 
Love-lies-bleeding, even when they first creep out of the 
ground, are brilliant red, announcing the blossom from afar; 
those of the Caladium hicolor, Ciss^m discolor, Physurus 
picttis, Ancectocliilus argenteus and setacetis, Pledranthus con- 
color, and many others, are variegated with all the hues of 
summer gardens, and outshine tens of thousands of actual 
flowers. In the genus Tillandsia they are often striped as 
if with raiabows. It is not implied, or at least it is not a 
rule, that richly-tinted leaves predict richly-tinted flowers as 
coming by and by upon the same stem. Prefigurement 
may or may not refer thus particularly; its tidings are for 
the most part of a future glory in nature as a whole. The 
flowers of plants are foretold also by the bracteas and even 
by the calyces of certain kinds. Such is the case with the 
Euphorbia splendens, several species of Salvia, the Hydran- 
gea, and the white-winged Musscenda frondosa. By means 
of their veins and other peculiarities, leaves in other cases 
apprize us of the very configuration of the tree they are 
buildiug up. The angle at which the veins diverge is often 
the same as that which the branches make with regard to the 
trunk; where the leaves are sessile, the stem is usually set 
with branches down to the very ground; where they are 



PREFIGURATION IN PLANTS. 437 

petiolate, the stem is also naked to a considerable height. 
"So far," say Dickie and McCosh, "as we have been able to 
generalize a very extensive series of facts before us, we are 
inclined to lay down the provisional law that the whole 
leafage coming out at one place on the stem corresponds to 
the whole plant, and that the venation of each single leaf 
corresponds to the ramification of a branch."* In certain 
mosses, as the Hypnum dendroides and Hypnum alopecurum, 
may be found miniatures of every tree in an arboretum. 

249. The presignificance of Animal forms and economy 
by plants extend to the whole of their organic functions, 
many of their very organs, even to their spontaneous move- 
ments, their habits and qualities. As regards structure, the 
soft parts of the animal body are foretold by the succulent 
portion of the plant ; the veins and blood by the ducts and 
vessels, with their rills of sap ; the bones by its strong skele- 
ton of woody fibre.f What is the nature of vegetable 
Feeding has been shown in a former chapter. It may be 
added that the eating of organized food, esteemed so pecu- 
liarly distinctive of animals, has its prefigurement in the 
Drosera and Dioncea; those curious little plants already 
mentioned on p. 49, which by means of appendages to their 



* Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, Book 2, chap. 2, 
(1856.) See which excellent work for abundant illustration of the 
facts adverted to. 

f Nowhere in nature are there more finished examples of skele- 
tons than occur in plants. Those furnished by the capsules of the 
Stramonium, the Henbane, and the Campanula, and by the leaves 
of the holly, poplar, and Indian fig, when grouped and glass-shaded 
like wax-flowers, are fit ornaments for the most recherche drawing- 
room. The best are obtained by artificial maceration, but singularly 
beautiful specimens often occur among the natural relics of the au- 
tumn. The Indian fig-leaves are those imported from China. 
.S7« 



438 SLEEP OF PLANTS. 

leaves, entrap the smaller kinds of insects, as flies are en- 
snared in spiders' webs, and then appear to suck and ab- 
sorb their juices. From June to August, when the English 
species of these vegetable carnivora are most active, there is 
scarcely a leaf in which we may not see either a recently- 
caught victim, or the desiccated relics of a former one. 
Vegetable Sleep is that relaxation of the vital processes 
which is indicated by the folding together and drooping of 
the leaves as night approaches, prefiguring the listlessness 
and supine attitude of the dormant animal, and further, in 
the beautiful phenomenon of the closing, eyelid-like, of the 
petals of the flowers, so charming to watch in the stillness 
of summer twilight. All plants do not exhibit these pheno- 
mena, but there are probably none Avhich do not experience 
a periodical repose (at least when they are in a state of 
growth and inflorescence), eminently beneficial to their 
health, whether marked by external change or not. It is 
not to be understood that there is actual sleep in plants. 
Real sleep occurs only where animal functions are super- 
added to simply vegetative ones. The classes of plants 
wherein the prefiguration of sleep is chiefly conspicuous are 
the Legummosse and the Compositae, the former closing 
their leaves, and the latter their flowers. Strikingly beau- 
tiful examples occur also in the water-lilies, the crocus, and 
the poppy, lulled as it were by its own Lethean balm. 
Those plants which do not open their flowers till sunset, as 
the Evening-primrose, or until night is far advanced, as the 
Cereus grandiflorus, seem to be the harbingers in the vege- 
table world, of those nocturnal birds, animals, and insects 
which are active only after dark, when all others are asleep. 
The Night-scented stock, and other flowers which are fra- 
grant only or chiefly in the evening, are the heralds of the 
nightingale. Certain other plants agree with certain other 
kinds of birds in being peculiarly matutinal. Go out as 



REPKODUCTION OF PLANTS. 439 

early as we will, we find the delicate white bells of the wild 
convolvulus in the dewy hedge, and the rich imperial purple 
and crimson ones in the garden, just as we are never too 
soon for the chaffinch, the blackbird, and the lark. More 
wonderfully yet is Procreation foretold by plants. The ap- 
paratus, the mode, the circumstances, the results, all are de- 
licately, but explicitly and fully announced. The lower 
kinds of plants, as fungi and lichens, wherein distinctness of 
sexual organization is imperfect, point to sponges and their 
congeners; the higher kinds, as roses and apple-trees, which 
have male and female as plainly marked as in mankind, 
prefigure in this respect, mammals, birds, insects, and all 
the nobler animate beings. Every individual flower on a 
given plant is a fore-shining of the nest of the bird, and the 
lair of the quadruped, and consummately, in its beautiful, 
silken, shielding petals, of the inmost curtained sanctuary 
of married love. The very colors and the fragrance per- 
form a part in the exquisite proem, being to the flower what 
sensation is to the creature, and emotion and sentiment to 
man. It is by reason of what it foretells, that the flower is 
so lovely. So near is the plant lifted towards the animal 
world, during the period of its sexual activity, that it be- 
comes illuminated by the light of human love, reflecting the 
loveliness of the higher nature, like woods made musical by 
the descent into them of the singing birds. As with Sleep, 
there is no genuine sex in plants ; this belongs purely to the 
animal world. The hymeneal hour gone by, and fertiliza- 
tion accomplished, the rudimentary seed begins to form, 
giving a presage of antenatal existence, followed in turn by 
a prefigurement of parturition in the bursting of the pod, 
and the escape of the ripened seeds. Finally, the seed itself, 
while in course of formation, is connected with the ovarium 
by a funis ; when detached, it is marked with an umbilical 
sear. Even lactation is prefigured in plants. The germi- 



440 ANIMAL POEMS FORETOLD BY PLANTS. 

nating embryo of the seed, too small and tender to live by 
itself, has vegetable mammae provided for it in the cotyle- 
dons, which, white and rounded, nourish it with their sweet, 
milk-like contents. In the two large white symmetrical 
halves of the almond, the filbert, the acorn, the bean, we see 
this exemplified in perfection. They are no part of the fu- 
ture plant, which grows entirely out of the little hinge-like 
body lying at the point where they unite. Everywhere in 
nature the mother's bosom is foretold. The streams which 
" give drink to every beast of the field, where the wild asses 
quench their thirst," are its adumbrations in the great world 
of inorganic nature ; to " flow with milk and honey" is the 
poetical or natural metaphor for the irrigation of a thirsty 
land with nutrient rivers. Rocks and towering mountains 
have a terrible and romantic grandeur, but the beauty of 
earth lies in those round, gently-swelling hills and eminences 
which the French so appropriately call mamelons. Not that 
the figure is a modern one. The Greeks termed such hills 
ztrdoi and fiaaxoi. A mound of this form at Samos, Calli- 
machus calls " the breast of Parthenia." 

250. The special prefigurations of animal ideas by plants 
are no less striking than the general. Thus, in the large, 
white, ovate berry of the Solanum Melongena or " Egg- 
plant," we have the Qg^ of the domestic fowl ; in the pods 
of certain leguminous plants, bivalve shells, with their occu- 
pants; in the stem of the Testudinaria, a tortoise; in the 
seed of the Ophiocaryon, a coiled-up serpent, with glaring 
eyes, ready to dart upon its prey. The caterpillar is seen in 
the pod of the Scorpiurus; the antlers of the stag in the 
leaves of the Acrostichum aleiorne; the cocoa-nut gives tid- 
ings of the round brown head and comical visage of the 
monkey. Fishes are not the first beings to be clothed with 
scales ; they are anticipated on the leaves of the Hippophae 
and Elceagnus ; the hair, wool, and fur of terrestrial crea- 



ANIMAL FOEMS FORETOLD BY PLANTS. 441 

tures are similarly announced by the vestures of the Ona- 
phaliwn and Verbasciim, while many ferns have their stems 
covered with quad-p\nvaage. The unexpanded buds of the 
great Shield-fern, Mr. Gosse compares to the shell of the 
Trochus magus. (Aquarium, p. 70.) The names Lagurus, 
Bird's-foot, Cock's-comb, Echinocactus, Phytelephas,* and a 
hundred others, refer to foreshadowings of the same cha- 
racter. So with the title of the large and beautiful family 
called Papilionaeece, literally, "the Butterflies," typically 
represented in the Sweet-pea. In these we see Nature's 
first step towards the Insect-world, or at least towards the 
lepidopterous class. "The insect-world," says Coleridge, 
"taken at large, appears an intenser life, that has struggled 
itself loose, and become emancipated from vegetation. Florae, 
liherti et libertini! If, for the sake of a moment's relaxa- 
tion, we might indulge a Darwinian flight, we might ima- 
gine the life of insects an apotheosis of the petals, stamens, 
and nectaries round which they flutter." There is no need 
for this; there is ample delight in the simple truth of the 
prefiguration, which ranks with the loveliest in nature. In 
that charming book, "Episodes of Insect Life," there is a 
long discourse upon the subject, to which the interested in it 
should not fail to refer.f It is not a little curious that the 
moths called from the time of their appearance "night-flyers," 
are generally of a subdued tone of color, corresponding with 
that prevalent in the nocturnal flowers. More prefigurative 
even than the Papilionacese are the Orchids, which present 



* "Phytelephas" is the appropriate name of the palm, the seeds 
of which, commonly known as Vegetable ivory, have now so exten- 
sively superseded the tusk of the elephant, as regards parasol and 
umbrella handles, and the numberless little articles of the toy-shop 
and ladies' work-boxes. 

t Vol. 1, p. 306. See also Vol. 2, pp. 294, 295. 



442 ORCHIDEOUS PLANTS. 

the forms not only of insects, but of birds, and even reptiles. 
Even our indigenous species, next to the ferns the most 
attractive of British plants, mount so high towards animality, 
that we discern in different kinds the bee, the wasp, the 
butterfly, and the spider. The European Orchids are ter- 
restrial plants, but the tropical and principal part of the 
family are epiphytes, that is, instead of anchoring in the 
earth, like the mass of vegetation, they perch upon other 
plants, and usually upon trees, in the clefts of which they 
lodge. Thus lifting themselves away from the earth, they 
beautifully presigniiy the aerial life, as well as the forms of 
bird and insect; and in the tenuity of their flower-stems, 
whereby the blossoms seem to flutter in the air, predict even 
the animal freedom from all bonds, and preeminently the 
living liberty given by wiugs. The inclinations which 
prompt both the Orchids and all other epiphytes to forsake 
the earth, and seek the friendly support of stronger plants, 
are the first prophecies and signs of volition and social sen- 
timent. Actual motion is prefigured in the Sensitive-plants, 
described on page 18, As regards the natures, habits, and 
peculiar phenomena of animals, vicious and poisonous ones 
are foreshadowed in the nettle ;* the sharp and rending teeth 
of wild beasts in thorns and thistles. There are grasses 
which anticipate the camel in providing against drought; 
the phosphorescence of the glow-worm and the fire-fly is a 
brightening of the light which first shines in the Rhizo- 
morpha and the luminous Agarics; the juice of the Sangui- 
naria is like blood ; that of the Palo de Vaca, or Cow-tree, 



* The Nettle-plants, says Schleiden, are "the serpents of the vege- 
table kingdom. The similarity between the instruments with which 
both produce and poison their wounds is very remarkable." See 
his minute account of the apparatus, and a drawing of the nettle- 
sting, in "The Plant, a Biography," Lecture VIII., pp. 199, 200. 



THE WALNUT, POMEGEANATE, &G. 443 

is like milk, not only in color, but in fitness for human food. 
In a few cases the prefigurations point directly towards 
mankind. Such are those which occur in the Orchis mas- 
cula, the Uvularia, the Phallus, and the Clitoria, names 
sufficiently descriptive of their extraordinary nature. In 
the walnut is a hint of the human head. The shell is the 
skull ; the kernel, white, oval, convex, curiously convoluted, 
and enclosed in two delicate membranes, is the brain. 
Because of this resemblance, this fruit is in its native Eastern 
countries, called the " brain-nut." The stems of the Balsam, 
the Stellaria, the Carnation, and their allies, prefigure, in 
their long slender shafts and peculiar joints, the bones of the 
leg and arm, " The stalk which supports the leaflets of a spe- 
cies of -lEsculus (the Horse-chesnut) exactly resembles a 
bone of the hand or foot ; while in the Manna ash we have 
four or more pieces of like shape, forming the main stalk of 
the compound leaf, separating at the joints, and resembling 
a series of phalanges, as in a finger or toe."* Far above 
all, is the exquisite presignificance conveyed in the pome- 
granate, which, newly ripe, and before the crown has 
expanded, is a perfect representation of the full-grown virgin 
breast. Some varieties of apples bear a similar resemblance, 
furnishing one of the most beautiful metaphors of Greek 
poetry : in Theocritus, for instance, fidXa zea yyodovxa, 
"thy downy apples." (xxvii. 48.) In that truly elegant 
descriptive pastoral, hardly inferior to any in Theocritus, 
"The Garden of Phyllion" of Aristsenetus, apples floating 
down the stream in which she is bathing, are mistaken for 
Limona's breasts by her companion : — ■ 

But my love's bosom oft deceived my eye, 
Eesembling those fair fruits that glided by ; 



* Dickie and McCosh, p. 185. 



444 LANGUAGE OF FLOWEllS. 

For when I thought her swelling breast to clasp, 
An apple met my disappointed grasp.* 

In the poetry of the Orientals, Ave find the pomegranate fur- 
nishing similar allusions. The temple of Solomon, which 
in its every circumstance and particular, was representative 
and antetypical of the Cliristian church, was, on account of 
the correspondence of the female bosom, largely adorned 
with pomegranates of gold. 

251. The presignificance of mental and moral qualities 
by plants is fully as extensive as that of organic structure 
and configuration. This arises, of course, from the corre- 
spondence which subsists between the material and the spi- 
ritual worlds. The former, as the representative of the 
latter, must needs prefigure it. Thus the box-tree foretells 
stoicism ; the chamomile-plant energy and patience in ad- 
versity ; the ash and mulberry prefigure prudence ; the net- 
tle is a presage of spitefulness ; trees like the Hernandia, that 
make a great display of foliage, but produce no fruit of any 
value, apprize us of pretentious but empty boasters. It was 
not from their mere commercial value that the dowry of a 
Greek bride was paid in olive plants, any more than it is from 
mere fancy that the English one wears a wreath of orange- 
blossom. It prefigures the virtues and the aptitudes which 
adorn and should appear in the wife. The leaves are green 



* Compare Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 155 ; and Acharnenses, 1198 ; 
also the allusion in that charming little poem in the fourth book of 
the Anthologia (De Bosch, vol. 2, p. 420), beginning rav iKfyyovcrav 
jitarpof, and descriptive of Venus rising from the sea. See likewise, 
Wharton's Theocritus, vol. 2, pp. 296-299 ; 4to., 1770. Why, in an- 
cient times, the apj^le was sacred to Venus, is easy to understand. 
The curious may read concerning its symbolic use, the Hierogly- 
■phic'a of Pierius, Lib. LIV., cap. 1-14, de malo (pp. 573-577), and 
Alciati, Emblemata, p. 814. 



PREFIGURATIONS IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 445 

all the year round ; flowers white and fragrant, fruits full 
grown, and others in youngest infancy, are always to be 
seen on this beautiful tree. We may gather from Scripture 
why the ancients placed palm-branches in the hands of their 
statues of Temperance and Cheerfulness, and why in Egypt 
a vine was the hieroglyph of intelligence. Many plants are 
social, or often found in each other's company. Between 
others there exists a kind of discord or enmity; that is, they 
do not flourish when in proximity, and seem even to render 
the sou unfit for each other's support. Others again inflict 
injury by their peculiar twining and constricting mode of 
groAvth ; others by the deep shade they cast. " Orobanche," 
the name of a well known genus of parasitic plants, means 
literally the " vetch-strangler." In the tribe of grasses, 
which invariably grow in company, we see the gregarious 
instinct foreshadowed. In other cases, there is love of 
solitude and seclusion, 

252. Chiefly of this latter nature are the prefigurations 
which occur in the last or Animal kingdom. The mineral 
having foretold the plant, and the plant the animal, this last 
can do no more than point to Intellect and Affections. All 
that is presignified by plants with regard to human charac- 
ter, is reiterated, and with new emphasis, by animals, in their 
various habits, economies, and instincts. Language is fore- 
told in their various cries ; singing in the warbling of the 
birds — next to the voice of woman, the sweetest melody in 
nature. To this no doubt is owing that peculiar and 
striking adaptation to the human ear of the music of birds 
which makes it the most tender and beautiful relation by 
which man is connected with the external world. Human 
Art is preceded in the fabricative instincts, as of the bee, 
the wasp, and the beaver. Democritus contended that men 
learnt weaving from spiders, and architecture from the nest- 
builders. Citizenshij) and social compact are prefigured in 



446 PREFIGURATIONS IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 

the gregarious animals, as the anteloj)es and the deer. Pa- 
rental affection, anger, vanity, courage, cowardice, mildness, 
fidelity, grief, artifice, rapacity, all have their first shows in 
difTerent creatures, and after the same manner ; i. e., only as 
shows, inasmuch as they remain, like the architecture and the 
warbling, the same from age to age and every^vhere, whereas 
in mankind they are local and elastic. In the canine race 
is prefigured even the sentiment of veneration. To a noble- 
spirited dog, a kind and generous master is a god. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

TME CHAIK OF NATURE. 

253. The Chain of Nature, one of the most beautiful of 
philosophic truths, is at the same time one of the most de- 
fectively understood. It would seem to be the fate of all 
great truths to be most familiar to the world under the 
guise of some mistaken apprehension. As popularly re- 
garded, it has its likeness in Bishop Berkeley's celebrated 
book called Siris, which begins with the medicinal virtues 
of tar-water, and insensibly mounting upwards, through 
every variety of learning, ends in a discourse upon the Tri- 
nity. The genuine Chain of nature is another thing alto- 
gether. Plants are higher in the scale of being than mine- 
rals, and animals than plants, and in each kingdom there are 
series of forms, successively more and more complex ; but 
there is none of that complete and absolute progression from 
the lowest mineral to the highest animal, which is ordinarily 
supposed. Such a sequence is not only not consonant with 
the true principles of harmony and symmetrical disposition, 
tbut at variance with them ; certainly it is not borne out 
3ither by analogy or facts. The appearances, as we shall 
[see presently, in which the popular belief originated, and 
[which are esteemed its evidence and verification, prove, not 
[as most frequently happens in matters of testimony, too lit- 
nle, but too viuch. They prove, not that there is a chain, 
but that there are thousands, nay, millions of chains. The 
idea is an exceedingly ancient one. Macrobius thinks it in- 

447 



448 homer's golden chain. 

tended in the famous " golden chain " of Homer. " Since 
all things," says he, " follow in continuous succession, de- 
generating in order, to the very bottom of the series, the 
more attentive observer will discover a connection of parts, 
down from the Supreme God to the last off-scouring of na- 
ture, mutually linked together, and without any interrup- 
tion. And this is Homer's golden chain, which he tells us 
Jupiter ordained to be let down from heaven to earth."* 
In the 27th Dissertation of the accomplished and delightful 
Maximus Tyrius, it is adduced with a view to illustrating 
the nature of Socrates' daifxcov or guardian angel, the sub- 
ject of this and the preceding discourse. In nature, he 
tells us, there is a regular gradation of being, commencing 
with God, and terminating with plants, each rank of exist- 
ence being connected with one above, and one below, by the 
union of different qualities in the same body. The datiiove^ 
partake of the divine nature on the one hand, and of the 
human on the other. In modern times the idea has had 
the support of Addison, Locke, and Dugald Stewart. " !N"a- 
ture," says Addison, " is filled up with divers kinds of crea- 
tures, rising one above another by such a gentle and easy 
ascent, that the little transitions and deviations from one 
species to another are almost insensible." (Spectator 579.) 
Locke's account occurs in the Essay on the Human Under- 
standing, (Book iii. chap. 6,) finishing with a rather amusing 
allusion to " what is confidently reported of mermaids." Du- 
gald Stewart's may be found in the Outlines of Moral Phi- 
losophy, section 109. To no one, however, does the hypo- 
thesis owe so much to the enthusiastic Genevese naturalist, 
Charles Bonnet. In his work entitled " Contemplation de 



* Cumque omnia continuis, &c. In Somnium Scipionis Com- 
ment,, Lib. I. cap, xiv. 



bonnet's hypothesis. 449 

la Nature," he takes up the proposition of Leibnitz, that 
everything in the universe is connected, and that nature 
makes no leaps. This — unlike the German philosopher, 
who confines its application to successive events, having the 
relation of causes and effects, or at most to the reciprocal 
action and reaction of cotemporary beings — Bonnet extends, 
with astonishing ingenuity, to the forms of those beings. 
Commencing with the consideration of the ruder and more 
simple substances of our planet, he successively introduces 
us to minerals, plants, and animals, mounting through the 
various species of the latter up to man, and exhibiting his 
conclusions, at the last, in a kind of thermometrical table. 
At the bottom we have matieres plus suhtiles, then feu, then 
air, then eau, and at the top rSomme.^ Unfolded with the 
sprightliest eloquence, the enchanting picture could not fail 
to gain many admirers, and for a long period naturalists 
busied themselves in filling up the vacancies which the want 
of observation, in their view, still left in Bonnet's scale, the 
discovery of an additional link being an object of their 
greatest interest and delight. In Applegarth's Theological 
Survey (p. 270) we are treated to a panorama still more 
extensive, namely, a scale of being of which the foot is the 
magnet, and the apex the cherubim. This last carries out 
the idea entertained by many, both before and after, that 
man himself is only an intermediate ; in other words, that 
there are as many varieties of animated existence above him 
as there are below, successively nearer and nearer to the 
Almighty. There is no more substantial ground for such a 



* The table in question forms the frontispiece to Vol. I. of the 
collected works (Neuchatel, 1781), the "Contemplation" being in 
Vol. IV. The original publication, in 2 vols. 8vo, was seventeen 
years earlier. 

38 * 



450 MAN THE HIGHEST OF CREATED FORMS. 

belief than for the hypothesis of an exact sequence of ter- 
restrial things. There are only three orders of being in the 
universe, the Absolute, the rational finite, and the irrational 
finite, or God, man, and what is inferior to man. Degrees 
of celestial intelligence and authority we may readily sup- 
pose, as " one star differeth from another in glory ;" there 
are men who are greater than man as he is here, but there 
is no form superior to the human. If the human form be 
as Revelation intimates, " the image of God," there can be 
no room for intermediate forms. The name of "angel" as 
said before, is a designation, not of difierence of nature, but 
of office. The angels themselves are both in the Old Testa- 
ment and the New, called indifierently " angels and men." 
Compare verses 1 to 16 of Genesis xix., and verses 4 and 
23 of Luke xxix. The correct rendering of the only text 
in Scripture which seems to countenance the opinion that 
angels are nobler in the scale of being than makind, teaches, 
not as the common version has it, that man is " a little 
lower than the angek," but " a little lower than Eloliim." 
The Psalm in which the words occur is a kind of resume of 
the Mosaic history of the creation, and simply repeats in 
other terms, " that God created man in his own image." 

254. It is possible, unquestionably, and easy, to pick out 
a series of forms which can be placed, as by Bonnet, so as 
to stand in a seeming natural sequence. But to eflfect this 
as many more must be left aside, which cannot be incorpo- 
rated either into the same, or into any linear scale. A true 
"chain of being" would not only provide places for all 
things without exception, but demand them as indispensable 
to its construction. Things are related by so curious and 
vast a variety of particulars, that if we attemjDt to arrange 
them in an exact series and gradation, violence is done at 
every step to some close afiinity, one point of resemblance 
being necessarily neglected for the sake of another, and the 



TRUE IDEA OF NATURAL AFFINITIES. 451 

determination where each species shall be located becomes 
almost entirely a matter of fancy. Which are the plants, 
for example, best deserving to be placed next to animals? 
Nothing is more like an animal than the Sensitive-plant, as 
regards its power of movement, yet the Sensitive-plant is the 
very furthest removed from what naturalists universally 
call the "zoophytes." Even a chain-like classification of 
the forms belonging to the separate departments of nature 
becomes practicable, if attempted on a scale of any extent, 
only by such artificial and conventional methodizing as the 
thirteen andrian classes of the botanical system of Linnseus. 
Natural orders, classes, &c. do certainly follow one another 
seriatim in books, as if it were so in nature, but this is purely 
an exigency of the pen. In writing, we must needs begin 
with something, and go on, and finish with something, just 
as in order to survey the world, we must start from a sj)ecific 
point. The real relation of natural orders and classes, and 
no less so of species, is that of the provinces of a great em- 
pire, every one of which is in marginal contact with many 
others. It is under the influence of this insight that those 
grand theories of classification have been conceived which 
arrange the objects of nature after the manner of solar sys- 
tems, the highest forms being placed as centres, and the 
lower ones round about them; these latter gradually ap- 
proximating towards other centres. "This radiation, as it 
were," says Kir by, "from a typical form as a centre, by 
various roads towards difierent tribes, seems to prove that 
the world of animals, as well as that of heavenly bodies, 
consists of numerous systems, each with its central orb. . . 
From the genus Patella, among the mollus- 
cous animals, by different and diverging routes, we may 
arrive at almost any molluscan group or tribe." (Bridge- 
water Treatise, p. 275.) In the vegetable kingdom it is the 
same. Families most unlike in the total of their characters, 



452 THEORY OF EEGULAR GRADATION. 

consociate by means of planets which, though remote from 
their respective suns, are in close proximity with one an- 
other. On the other hand, while immense number of spe- 
cies, both of animals and of plants, are so closely allied as 
to furnish naturalists with "genera," not a few species stand 
completely isolated: on account of their very distinct and 
peculiar forms, they cannot be associated with any others. 
To place the whole in one grand continuous line would 
obviously require that sometimes a solitary species should 
be taken, at other times vast suites of species. The genus 
Erica, for examplie, the four or five hundred species of which 
are all upon a level in point of excellence, would have to 
be esteemed as a single species. Legitimately, there is no 
place in the hypothetical chain of nature for many even of 
the families of living things — Birds for instance, which by 
reason of their two wings, two feet, a bill either partly or 
entirely horny, and a body covered with feathers, are dis- 
tinguished so entirely from all other animals as to constitute 
an absolutely independent class of beings, merging into no 
other class, either above them or below. Blumenbach, who 
is as fond of citing objections to the hypothesis of the single 
chain as Bonnet is devoted to the assertion of it, remarks to 
the same purpose concerning the Tortoises : " The very pecu- 
liar and distinct form of this isolated group," says he, " con- 
stitutes a strong proof of the non-existence of the supposed 
gradation of objects in nature." 

255. That there are mixed or transitional beings in na- 
ture, is as much an hypothesis as the Chain, being, in fact, 
a part of it. Doubtless there are many curious organisms 
which from some peculiarity of structure, appear to be com- 
binations of two other kinds ; the whale, for example, which 
in an arbitrary and popular sense, conjoins fishes to mam- 
mals. But it is no mixture in the strict sense of the word, 
any more than such aquatic plants as the Ranunculus aqua- 



NO MIXED BEINGS IN NATURE. 453 

tilis and the Sium inundatum, witli their seaweed-like foliage, 
conjoiQ terrestrial exogens and algse. Connection, to a cer- 
tain extent, there is also, both in plants and animals. No 
two species are so closely allied, but that there is room 
between them for a third, as proved by the frequent disco- 
very of such intermediates in countries newly explored. 
But this is a very different thing from mixture or insensible 
transition. Lithophytes, zoophytes, phytozoa,* are mere 
names. None of the beings so designated are really two- 
fold. Nowhere in the world is there an object which may 
be referred with equal or even plausible propriety, to the 
mineral kingdom or to the vegetable, to the vegetable or to 
the animal; or which, as used to be said of the fresh-water 
polypus, is at once "the last of animals, and the first of 
plants." 

256. In thus criticizing the doctrine of the Chain of Being, 
it is not intended to imply that it is current in modern 
science. No one who is conversant with the writings of 
Cuvier, Swainson, or Lindley, believes in that universal 
auviyeta which the authority of Aristotle was for centuries 
sufiicient to certify. "May we expect," says Eymer Jones, 
" as we advance from the lower types of organization to such 
as are more perfect, to be led on through an unbroken and 
continuous series of creatures, gradually rising in importance 



* The vermiform filaments contained in the antheridia of Charas, 
Mosses, and other cryptogamous plants, are by some authors called 
"phytozoa." It is scarcely necessary to say that the term is used 
above as by Ehrenberg, or in its proper, etymological sense of 
"plant-animals," which should never have been departed from. 
The German naturalist Horaninow, who divides the organic world 
into vegetables, "phytozoa," animals and Man, gives to the word a 
still greater ambiguity, by including under it the fungi and the 
algse. 



454 DISCRETE DEGREES. 

and complexity of structure, each succeeding tribe of beings 
presenting an advance upon the preceding, and merging 
insensibly into that which follows it? A very slight exami- 
nation will convince us to the contrary." All, hoAvever, are 
not scientific botanists and zoologists, and so long as popular 
authors continue blindly to re-assert it, Bucke, for example, 
in the "Beauties, Harmonies, and Sublimities of Nature," 
so long must the error be met with new exposure. Besides, 
it is by acquainting ourselves with the defects and inconsist- 
encies of the popular idea, that we become best able to 
appreciate the genuine. Those who, with Bonnet, sought so 
ardently to establish it would have escaped their pleasing 
illusion had they applied themselves to the diligent exami- 
nation of Species, in Natural History the very basis of 
accurate knowledge. Bonnet himself appears to have j)ar- 
ticipated in that unwise contempt for the minute discrimi- 
nation of individual forms which at the time he lived was 
proscribed under the name of "nomenclature," and like 
other men of merit never to have imagined its immense 
value. 

257. The true idea of the Chain of Nature has for its 
centre the law of Discrete Degrees,* — a law which has 
been several times alluded to, and which the time is now 
come to illustrate specially. "To-day," says M. Victor 
Cousin, "two great wants are felt by man. The first, the 
most iinperious, is that of fixed, immutable principles, which 
depend upon neither place, nor time, nor circumstance, and 



* The reader to whom " discrete" may be a new word, must re- 
ceive it as signifying "parted" or "severed." The term belongs 
originally and properly to the philosophy of the illustrious Sweden- 
borg, the first to discriminate the two-fold nature of Degrees. See, 
for his exposition of the subject, the volume on the "Divine Love 
and Wisdom." 



LAW OF DISCRETE DEGREES. 455 

on which the mind reposes with unbounded confidence. In 
all investigations, as long as we have seized only isolated, 
disconnected facts, as long as we have not referred them to 
a general law, we possess the material of science, but as yet 
there is no science. Even physics commence only when 
universal truths appear, to which all the facts of the same 
order that observation discovers to us in nature may be re- 
ferred."* In the law of Discrete degrees we realize one of 
these sterling principles. Intelligently applied, it clears 
away difficulties that are insuperable before; it puts us on 
our guard against merely apparent truths, and ratifies and 
shows the rationale of the genuine; and while it exposes 
what is false in our preconceived ideas, becomes a means and 
highway to new and accurate ones. It is not too much to 
say that it has been the want of an enlarged and philoso- 
phical recognition of the law of Discrete degrees which has 
mainly led to many of the grossest errors of materialism, — 
that spirit, for example, is only matter attenuated and etheri- 
alized ; — ^to the weary, iterated and reiterated, but still fruitless 
controversies concerning instinct and reason, with the varied 
evils that have followed in their wake; to the popular mis- 
conception of the Chain of Being; and though last, not 
least, to the mischievous hypotheses of "progressive develop- 
ment." The law of Correspondence, which is another of 
the sterling principles desiderated by Victor Cousin, and the 
law of Discrete degrees, taken together, and properly de- 
veloped and applied, would form the most efiicient of all 
possible aids to the discovery of that grand philosophic 
ultimatum, the System of Nature. Thence they would tend, 
more than anything else, to draw the conflicts of the various 
schools of human thought and speculation to a close, and to 



* Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 33. 



456 CONTINUOUS DEGREES. 

supersede them with a noble unanimity; and bearing as they 
do, on the spiritual no less than on the material, would be- 
come preachers of holiness and religion. The long-looked- 
for, long-prayed-for reign of God upon earth, cannot begin 
till the reign of the true science of creation, which will be 
at once its harbinger and the plane for its establishment. 

258. Looking abroad upon the external world, we find 
everywhere two great modes of special arrangement. Lati- 
tude or extension, and Altitude or elevation. Exactly 
accordant with this duality are the relations and the proper- 
ties of all the organisms and forms of nature, and of all the 
powers and principles of life. Those which are represented 
in latitude or extension are relations of Continuity; those 
represented in altitude comprise the relations we term Dis- 
crete. The difierence may be illustrated under the image 
of a splendid mansion. Discrete degrees are represented in 
its successive floors; Continuous degrees in the suites of 
apartments which they severally comprise. Let us move 
about as much as we will on a given floor, we are still on 
the same level ; it is only when we ascend to a higher or 
descend to a lower, that we essentially change our position ; 
the change is then, however, absolute and complete. So is 
it in nature. First, we have vast platforms, one above 
another ; secondly, on every platform innumerable chambers 
and noble galleries, respectively adapted and appropriated to 
some special use, possessing their own peculiar interest and 
attractions; also their lowest, superior, and most honorable 
places ; pointing, moreover, to the platform next above, and 
prefiguring and presignifyiug its contents, but never actually 
merging into or coalescing with it. To define these two kinds 
of relation more particularly, let us take examples from 
familiar nature, and first, as being the simplest, the relations 
of Continuity. 

259. Continuous degrees are those which intervene be- 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF CONTINUITY. 457 

tween the extreme phases or conditions of which any given 
subject or object is naturally susceptible, and which mark 
its development and historic progress up to the period of its 
consummation. Thus, the progress of the day is by continu- 
ous degrees; the night melts into the dawn, the dawn into 
the morning, the morning into noon. The influx of the tide 
upon the shore is by continuous degrees ; from low water to 
high, is one long, unintermittent flow, and the same when 
the waves retire. The march of the Seasons is by continuous 
degrees; Spring glides imperceptibly into Summer; summer 
as softly wanes into the year's beautiful old age, like human 
life, every day a little, and without halting for a moment. 
The tinting of the leaves in autumn, commonly called the 
fading of the leaves, is again by continuity. From the 
full, bright, living green of June, to the not-always "sere 
and yellow," but oftentimes rich crimson of October, — as 
when a monarch gathers his robes about him that he may 
die royally, — it is like the painting of the sky at the close of 
a summer's day, when the molten gold boils up behind the 
purple cloud-mountains of the west, and the very zenith and 
farthest east are tinted with virgin rose, — one long, soft, 
lovely transfiguration, such as the eye in vain essays to 
follow. Nowhere in nature is there a more beautiful analogy 
than this of sunset with the "many-colored woods" of the 
year's eventide. Everything in plants is more or less illus- 
trative of continuity. We see it most remarkably in what 
botanists call Varieties, all of which are sports within a 
given circle. The Broccoli and the Cauliflower are but 
modifications of the coarse marine cabbage. From wild 
sour crabs, scarcely larger than boys' marbles, have arisen 
all varieties of apples, not excluding the pippin and nonpa- 
reil; the austere and uneatable sloe is the source of the 
luscious plum; even wheat appears to be the culmination of 
an obscure grass, the jEgilops ovata. So with many of our 
39 U 



458 THE THREE KINGDOMS OF NATURE. 

choicest flowers. The innumerable varieties of carnations, 
fuchsias, pelargoniums, &c., are all resolvable into some 
simple and original form, from which they have arisen under 
the stimulus of culture, and to which, in the course of a 
generation or two, they relapse if left to themselves. The 
choicest pansies in a flower-garden, if neglected, return in a 
very few years, in their descendants, to the inconspicuous 
Viola tricolor of the fields. Were another example needed, 
we might point to the various conditions of which water is 
susceptible. According to the amount of caloric present in 
it, we have ice, water properly so called, or steam. Between 
the solid glacier and the white clouds from the locomotive, 
there is an exact continuity and gradation, and either ex- 
treme is convertible into the other. In degrees of Contin- 
uity, it will be observed, then, we have relations merely of 
state, not of kind, every new appearance and condition being 
developed out of its immediate predecessor, and limited to 
externals. "Whatever the amount of sport, whether in color 
or configuration, in density or in texture, the absolute internal 
nature remains the same, just as in regard to the human 
race : whether we take Caucasians or Ethiops, Bosjemans or 
Feejee islanders, all are resolvable into the zoological species 
Man. 

260. Where things are differentiated by a discrete degree, 
the commencement of the new one is not, as with continuity, 
where the inferior or prior one left off", but on a distinct and 
higher level, and under the influence of new principles. 
Every ending is absolute, and every beginning de novo, 
initiating an altogether nobler mode of existence, which 
culminates after its own manner, and is then succeeded by 
another. This is most strikingly displayed in the relations 
of the three great kingdoms of nature, Minerals, Plants, 
and Animals. So far from being true, as supposed by Con- 
tinuity and the "Vestiges," that the ending of one joins the 



EACH KINGDOM ON ITS OWN PLATFORM. 459 

foundation of the succeeding, it is here that the affinity and 
resemblance are the very slightest. The humblest forms of 
plants are those which are least like arborescent crystalliza- 
tions ; and the humblest forms of animals those which have 
least in common with the Mimosa. Each kingdom of nature, 
as it ascends towards its maximum, instead of approximating 
closer and closer to the next above, and eventually passing 
into it, in reality becomes more and more remote from it. 
They may be compared to three beautiful temples ; the first 
of Doric architecture, the second of Ionic, the third of Ro- 
man. Each temple is built on a plan of its own; the 
foundations have a measure of uniformity; but while the 
Doric pillars are simple shafts, the loftier and fluted Ionic 
are crowned with graceful, curling volutes, and the Compo- 
site, loftier still, with all the ornament that tasteftil luxury 
can engraft. Each kingdom starts on a platform of its own, 
as physiology will some day demonstrate beyond dispute; 
growing more distinct with every step, at last it enjoys a per- 
fection no less peculiarly its own. That perfection does not 
reside in the forms which seem to be connecting links with 
the kingdoms next above; the perfection and termination of 
each realm, as of each tribe and class, is in the maximum 
realization of its archetype. Quadrupeds, for example, do not 
termimate with the monkeys ; their maximum is the lion, the 
acknowledged king of beasts from time immemorial. So in 
the vegetable world. Endogens do not terminate with the 
Smilax, though it anticipates the netted leaves of the 
Exogens overhead; but with the princes of their archetype, 
the stately Palms. Though the several perfections are so 
unlike, there is still a fine harmony between them. The 
perfection of the mmeral kingdom in the lucid and brilliant 
Crystal, harmonizes with the perfection of the plant in the 
odorous and glowing Blossom, and both harmonize with the 
perfection of the animal, which resides in its vast powers of 



460 EULE IN THE ESTIMATE OP SPECIES. 

body and external sense. Brutes are possessed of these vast 
powers, because the ascent of the brute creation towards its 
maximum is away from man rather than in the direction of 
him, just as the mineral series divaricates from the plant, 
and the plant series from the animal. For man, though the 
head and archetype of all things, is no part of a specific 
chain, but a series in himself, at once a beginning and an 
end. Everywhere the maximum of the lower realm is more 
glorious than the minimum of the next above; man is ex- 
celled by the brutes he rules over, in swiftness, in eyesight, 
in delicacy of touch and smell,* because these things, though 
the perfection of the brutes, belong to the mere basis of 
humanity; — all creatures, however, in his own maximum, 
he transcendently excels, vindicating the supreme majesty 
of Intellect. In every maximum, it is further to be ob- 
served, all the forces of nature that have reference to it, are 
concentrated. Chemistry is at its acme in the moulding of 
the crystal ; vitality in the fashioning of the flower. 

261. When, therefore, we would rightly contemplate the 
great kingdoms of nature, or any of their subdivisions, we 
should begin by comparing summit with summit. The keys 
of knowledge are the perfections of nature. Descending from 
the capitals to the pedestals, we learn that the animal differs 
as widely from the vegetable, as both differ from the mine- 
ral. This should be our rule even in the comparison and 
estimate of species. " Every species is higher in some re- 
spects, and lower in others; there are many scales of per- 
fection in different respects, running, as it were, parallel Avith 
one another; so that in defining the degree of elevation of 
any particular species, we must take into account the posi- 



* Smell seems to be most acute in the predaceous mammalia; 
sight in the predaceous birds ; touch in the antennae of insects. 



EXCELLENCE CONSISTS IN COMBINATION. 461 

tion it occupies in the several scales jointly." The criterion 
of excellence is combination of properties. Man, for exam- 
ple, as just observed, is inferior to the dog, as regards smell, 
and to the elephant, as regards bulk, but in neither of these 
creatures, nor in any other, are so many properties combined 
as in himself; this at once places him immeasurably above 
them all. In regard to "lower" or "inferior" forms, and in 
general to maximum and minimtim, as spoken of the sepa- 
rate departments of nature, it is essential to remember care- 
fully that there is no such thing as defect in the works of 
God. "Higher forms" are simply such as are more com- 
plex in their organization than certain other forms. To the 
simple organization of the plant, for instance, in the Animal 
are added nerves, endowing it with the sensation which the 
plant has not. Instead of "lower" and "suj)erior," it would 
be better therefore to say "simple" and "complex," only 
that usage has established the former terms. So with the 
epithet "perfect" as applied to natural structures. Nothing 
is positively or absolutely mperfect. The tender moss is as 
perfect in its little sphere as the lordly forest-tree. " Per- 
fect" is used by the naturalist simply in a technical sense, to 
express "the degree in which those peculiarities are deve- 
loped which characterize a particular group. Those peculi- 
arities of structure, for example, which make an insect what 
it is, and not a worm or a crustacean, are found to be pre- 
sent in their greatest intensity, and in the fullest combina- 
tion, in the beetles; hence we say the beetles are the most 
perfect of their class. A beetle is not more perfect as an 
animal than any other, but it is more perfect as an insect." 
It is at once the most permanent and the most elaborate of 
insect forms. 

262. Not only is there no succession of one kingdom of 
nature above another by the maximum of the lower gradu- 
ally sliding into the minimum of the superior; the law of 

39 * 



462 DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN PLANTS AND ANIMALS. 

discrete degrees precludes intermixture at any other point, 
even at the foundations. The common opinion regarding 
the animal and vegetable worlds is, that at their commence- 
ment they are united. It is true that between the first ani- 
malcules and the first vegetalcules there is a seeming iden- 
tity, and that the embryo human organism itself does nut 
perceptibly differ from the earliest forms of plants; true, 
moreover, that the two classes of beings retain a kind of 
parallelism for a considerable distance. Both begin with 
the simple vesicle, the globe in miniature, the cylinder, and 
the disc, seeming to measure with their fine geometry the 
space which they are by and bye to fill so admirably; expe- 
rimenting more boldly as they proceed, the bells and vases 
of the polyps and the coral-creatures pair with the cups of 
the lichen and the thecse of the mosses, even to their peris- 
tomes; the divergence, however, rapidly becomes so wide, 
and the culminating extremes are so far asunder, as to prove 
them wholly distinct ideas of Almighty wisdom. "To sup- 
pose," well observes Dr. Harris, "that because it is difiicult 
to assign the boundaries of the two kingdoms, therefore 
there are no boundaries, would be as irrational as to con- 
clude that, because material atoms disappear, first from our 
unaided sight, and then even beyond the reach of microscopic 
power, there is a point at which they graduate into nothing- 
ness. A moment's reflection will show us that between that 
supposed point and the point beyond, there is all the differ- 
ence between body and space, something and nothing, an 
infinite difference. In the same manner, however slight the 
break, where the vegetable appears to graduate into the 
animal, such an interruption there is; and it is nothing less 
than an interruption in kind, a transition from identity to 
essential difference."* The dispute, not yet settled, as to 



Pre- Adamite Earth, pp. 245, 246. 



CONSTANCY OF SPECIES. 463 

whether those beautifiil little specks of life, the Desmidiese, 
are animals or vegetables, merely shows that we are still in 
ignorance of their essential nature. It is but a little while 
since opinions were similarly divided as to the sponges, 
Corallines, Sertularias, and even the fungi. Natural his- 
tory, like theology and every other great system of truth, 
always has its mysteries, though they are not always the 
same mysteries, either absolutely or relatively. 

263. The three great primary platforms of nature, 
minerals, plants, and animals, though they are the chief 
seat and illustration of discrete distinctiveness, by no means 
exhaust it. Each of these three principal platforms com- 
prises many minor ones, and each of these latter a multi- 
tude of still finer. The first are occuf)ied by the various 
tribes, classes, and families of beings, the last by genera and 
species, organs and organic tissues. Doubtless, the more 
minute our analysis, the more difficult becomes the deter- 
mination of the relative rank of the objects compared ; as 
when we compare, for example, the various genera of a 
" natural order," or the various species of a genus. Ordi- 
narily they are so alike in apparent excellence, that, as said 
above of the species of Erica, fancy and taste alone can 
graduate their merits ; that there is a discrete difference, we 
may nevertheless be assured, since nature in the principles 
of its least things, is invariably the same as in those of its 
greatest. The difficulty in nature is to see the law where it 
hides itself from us, and not to be led astray by appear- 
ances. Many things in nature which are contradicted by 
our senses, are nevertheless, true, and chief among them are 
these seeming equalities of things. To their discrete sepa- 
rateness is referable the constancy of species. Primarily 
dependent, as well said by Agassiz and Gould, " upon im- 



464 DIFFEEENCES COMMENCE IN THE BLOOD. 

material nature,"* that is to say, upon pre-existent forms in 
the Spiritual world, the fixedness of species rests proximately 
in the distinctiveness of their platforms, from which they 
are incapable of moving, either upwards or downwards; 
and which prevents them, at the same moment, from inter- 
marrying, and thus defacing and disordering the world with 
hybrids. The great mass of the organic forms commonly 
deemed hybrids are in reality mere varieties; i. e., sports of 
a given single species, rather than intermixtures of two 
different ones. Purely and entirely by reason of this abso- 
lute separateness, does it become possible to classify material 
objects into scientific systems, and to impersonate them with 
names. The boundaries being unalterably fixed, we are 
enabled, first to discriminate, and subsequently to recognize 
them. Were there no discrete degrees, the world instead of 
Koajuot;, would be ^do<;. St. Paul tells us of the discrete 
degrees of the animal world, when he says: "All flesh is 
not the same flesh ; there is one flesh of men, another flesh 
of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." Flesh 
is only consolidated blood. Not only hath God " made of 
one blood all nations of men ;" all things discretely sepa- 
rated, are of their own peculiar blood ; the differences in 
the vital fluid, (which, homogeneous and uniform as it is to 
the eye, is one of the most varied substances in nature,) are 
the inmost seats of all distinctions. Here, in the blood, 
begins the difference of creatures one from another; the 
Teeth, which are the last and completing effort of the vital 
energy, as the blood is the first, completing also the distinc- 
tions, and standing as the Omega to the Alpha of the 
crimson stream which originated their own material. The 
structure and form of the teeth constitutes so important a 



'■^ Outlines of Comparative Physiology, p. 



FUNCTIONS AND TISSUES. 465 

particular in the discrimination of species, that if any tribe 
of human beings were found to diifer materially in their 
dentition from the rest of mankind, it would justify a strong 
suspicion of a real specific difference — as strong a one as 
would arise from a difference in the form of the blood-discs. 
Discrete difference prevails as profoundly in the saps of 
plants ; and closely as they resemble in some points, between 
the vegetable and the animal tissues. Vegetable cells are 
discretely below animal cells ; no vegetable tissue could 
associate with animal tissue ; " it would be the sport of ac- 
tivities which it could neither share nor reciprocate." So 
with the vital functions. What are called the "vegetative 
functions" of animals are not yegetable. An animal is not, 
as to its physiology, plant plus animal, but wholly and 
absolutely sui generis. There are feeding, respiration, re- 
production, &c., in both, but they are never the same feed- 
ing, nor the same respiration. Every function, on the 
higher platform, is as totally difierent from those of the 
lower ones, as are the forms and organizations. Plants, for 
example, take carbon from the atmosphere, while animals 
take oxygen. Were the various properties which are dis- 
tributed among the members of the vegetable kingdom to 
be concentrated in a single individual, that individual would 
still be inferior to the ignoblest brute. The discrete degree 
pronounces once for all. Thus far and no farther. A long 
procession of discrete degrees, it may be added, often has 
the look of continuity, as in the case of the successive steps 
between the hoof of the quadruped and the human hand. 
They are shown to be discrete degrees which intervene, by 
not a single hoof having ever become anything more than 
a hoof, during the twenty centuries that naturalists have 
studied animal history; the hand of man similarly remain- 
ing the same from age to age. 

264. Along with discrete degrees it is important to con- 
W «■ 



466 LAW OF PROMOTION, 

sider the great companion law of 2^'>~oynoiion. Nature, in her 
ascent, leaves nothing behind; she subordinates, but never 
disuses; the past is always brought forward into the pre- 
sent; every degree of ascent is marked by new powers and 
new forms of apparatus, but with these are always essen- 
tially recapitulated all things that have previously been 
employed. The properties, moreover, which exist in the 
lower or anterior stages, are not only carried on to the 
superior, but are there applied to new and higher purposes. 
The physical laws which in the mineral world induce cohe- 
sion and affinity, and achieve their highest in the production 
of crystal flowers, these do not cease with the crystal; 
brought forward into the vegetable, they are as active as 
they were in the mineral, only that now they are no longer 
the rulers, but subordinated to the higher authority of the 
vital forces- These in turn move forward into the animal, 
where to chemistry and vitality are superadded senses and 
locomotion; all finally move forwards into man, where they 
lie under the- new and crowning magistracy of reason. Man, 
as said above, is not like lower natures, contained on a given 
platform, but a platform in himself, discretely separated 
from all below by his vertical attitude and consummate 
nervous system,* as a material organism; by his intellect 
and afiections as a vessel of life. He is all that has gone 
before, and Man besides. He feeds and sleeps with the 
vegetable; builds and procreates with the animal; talks, 
dresses, worships, hopes, laughs, and imagines, in virtue of 



* The most striking illustration of this occurs perhaps in relation 
to the human voice. It is not so much in the mere organs of the 
voice, as they are commonly called, the larynx, &c., that man differs 
from the inferior animals, and by which he is enabled to speak ; it 
is in the nerves rather, by which all the parts are combined into one 
simultaneous act. This is peculiar to him. 



VEGETABLE-CEYSTALS. 467 

his own original and unique humanity. In man all the 
operations of nature are concentrated and perfected. He is 
the continent of the world rather than contained in it ; the 
aggregate of all properties, phenomena, and uses; thus the 
summary and mirror of the whole of God's creation. He 
never ceases to be the lower natures, and cannot, for they 
are the basis and factors of his perfection. There are times 
when he is, practically, nothing else, and it is good that it 
should be so. "The master-piece of creation," says Lichten- 
berg, "must for a while, on his pillow, become a plant, in 
order that he may be this same master-piece." 

265. The promotion of jyhysiognamies is one of the most 
curious things in nature. As the crystal is a mineral flower, 
so is the flower a vegetable crystal. The geometry of the 
former reappears in flowers as their numerical proportion ; 
the angles and faces of the one, become the outlines and 
symmetry of the other. Flowers, however, have a greater 
variety of forms than crystals, and some of them are un- 
known to the mineral world, as the pentagonal. The tri- 
gonal and tetragonal are plentiful in both. The cube is 
recapitulated in that pretty little blossom of early Spring, 
the Adoxa moschatellina ; on the cone of the fir before it 
opens we have the most beautiful rhomboidal figures ; and 
in the delicate little organisms called Desmidiese, triangles, 
cylinders, and ellipses. 

266. The renewal, in the animal kingdom, of the features 
of plants and flowers, is divided between the arborescent 
polypifera, and those lovely marine productions, the Actiniae, 
popularly known as the sea-anemone, the sea-daisy, &c. 
The resemblance of these curious organisms to the rich, 
double, and many-colored varieties of the Anemone hor- 
tensis, and the Chrysanthemum, is most extraordinary. The 
Actinia equina, says Lamouroux, may be seen, when the 
tide retires, "ornamenting the sea-rocks with its beautiful 



468 ANIMAL-FLOWERS. 

colors, purple, violet, blue,* pink, yellow, and green, like so 
many flowers in a meadow." The Actinia Dianthus, or 
sea-carnation, the Actinia Calendula, or sea-marigold, and 
the Actinia Crassicornis, perhaps the finest example of the 
whole tribe, are miracles of beauty. Besides these, there is 
the exquisite genus Lucernaria, one species of which, the 
Lucernaria Auricula, transcends even the Actinias in its 
lovely renewal of the flower. No one who has collected 
Sertularias can have failed to observe their beautiful resem- 
blance to slenderly-branching trees of the cypress kind. 
" The polypidom," remarks Mr. Gosse, " of that very elegant 
species, the Sertularia cupressina, fine specimens of which 
are eight to twelve inches high, forms a taper-pointed spire, 
the numerous component branches of which are fan-shaped, 
and arch gracefully downwards, so that the resemblance to 
a tree of the pine tribe is neither fanciful nor remote." In 
no department of nature do we see more strikingly illus- 
trated the indifference to large and little in the workmanship 
of the Almighty; in a cluster of these delicate little polyp- 
trees, with their inhabitants, without the slightest voluntary 
effort of the imagination, we live over again among the 
noblest elements of the forest. But the great zoophytes of 
the tropical seas eclipse all. Ehrenberg was so struck with 
the magnificent spectacle of the floriform polyparia of the 
Red Sea, that he exclaimed, "Where is the paradise of 
flowers that can rival in variety and beauty these living 
wonders of the ocean!" Many species, Mr. Dana tells us, 
"spread out in broad leaves, and resemble some large plant 
just unfolding; others are gracefully branched, and the 



* When Lamouroux speaks of blue sea-anemones, he refers merely 
to the variegation of certain species. An Actinia wholly blue seems 
as unlikely a wonder as a blue dahlia or blue rose. 



SCIENCE OF NATURE AND OF MAN. 469 

whole surface blooms with stars of crimson, purple, and 
emerald green." At Macao, says another, "dendritic zoo- 
phytes, having their branches loaded with colored polyps, 
like trees covered with delicate blossoms, richly uprose from 
the clear bottom of the bay." (Adams, "Voyage of the 
Samarang.") The star-fishes recapitulate the various kinds 
of radiate flowers, and other stelliform products of plants ; 
the bilateral animals, or those in which the external mem- 
bers are in pairs, remind us of the configuration of the 
Labiatse. How beautifully even the simplest forms and 
phenomena of lower platforms are brought forward to the 
higher, is shown in the ice-plant, which recapitulates the 
hoar frost, and in the Drosera, gemmed with unforgotten 
dew. 

267. Understanding the law of promotion, we first begin 
to read truly, the great lessons inscribed on lower natures. 
Were there no animals man would be a thousand times 
more incomprehensible than he is ; animals, in turn, are si- 
milarly illustrated in the plant-world ; in either case because 
the lower nature shows in detail and prominently, what in 
the higher nature is obscured by subordination. Seeing that 
all things are mute predictions and prefigurements of Man, 
it follows again, conversely, that in the laws and phenomena 
of our own being, we have the keys to all phenomena beneath. 
All lower things derive their intelligibleness from higher 
ones ; we learn the nature of the world only by viewing it in 
the sunshine. The true science of nature we shall never be- 
come possessed of till it is studied, in every part, by the 
light of humanity ; — till the naturalist looks more narrowly 
to the congruity which subsists between the world and him- 
self — " the world of which he is lord, not because he is the 
most subtle inhabitant, but because he is its head and 
heart." 

40 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

TBE UNITY OF NATUBE. 

268. Now that we have seen how the various parts of 
nature stand related, viz., according to Discrete degrees and 
Continuous degrees ; also Avhat is the meaning and the 
teaching of Prefiguration ; the way is opened to a clearer 
and more comprehensive survey of the Analogies of nature, 
the phenomena which in their total, declare its Unity. 
As to the broad, general fact of this unity, there is nothing 
new to be said. Since the world is the work of God, and 
He is One, its constituent parts must needs correspond, not 
only with Him as their Designer and Creator, but likewise, 
in some way, with one another. In other words, the world 
as a whole cannot disjalay its Maker without its several 
parts doing the same, and to this end they must necessarily 
be alike. Such, accordingly, is the fact. " Everything in 
nature contains all the powers of nature. Each new form 
repeats not only the main character of the type, but part 
for part, all the details, aims, furtherances, hindrances, en- 
ergies, and whole system of every other. There is some- 
thing that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and 
night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a 
kernel of corn. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is 
a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. 
Each one is an entire emblem of human life, of its good 
and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course, and its end." We 
speak of the " physical geography" of the world. That 

470 



OISTLY ONE PHYSICAL SCIENCE 471 

which we find in the whole, we find over again in every 
scene and portion. The sea, for example, has its mountains 
and valleys, in the waves ; its rivers, in the currents ; its fo- 
rests and " ocean-garden," in the densely-planted and luxu- 
riant algse which adorn it as with trees and flowers. De- 
scending to the special provinces of nature, we find animals 
intimately analogous with plants, plants possessing analogies 
with minerals — each particular form, whether organic or in- 
organtic, being a miniature representative of the class to 
which it belongs, and all its factors representatives again of 
itself; the members show more or less,. the essential proper- 
ties of the total, the total is a vast expansion of the atom. 
Because of this unity, it follows that, absolutely, there is 
only one Science, at least only one physical science, just as 
in the doctrine of a celebrated school of ancient philosophy, 
there Was only one Virtue. That one science has various 
departments, whereby the incommensurableness of nature is 
brought down to our capacity; still it is only one science es- 
sentially, as we prove every day. Occupy ourselves with 
whatever province of it we may, we soon become sensible of 
its interconnection with others, and are frequently at a loss 
to determine the actual area that it covers. " The unity of 
science," says one of the profoundest thinkers of our day, 
" is the reflection of the unity of nature, and of the unity of 
the Supreme Reason and Intelligence which pervades and 
rules over nature, and from which all reason and all science 
are derived." It follows again that in all our investigations 
of natural phenomena, if we would justly comprehend them, 
we should more and more vigilantly look for likenesses. 
The beginning of philosophy is the study of difierences, but 
we climb to that beautiful Olympus where simple and es- 
sential Truths reside, the heaven of all the other spheres of 
knowledge, by comparing, and deducing resemblances ; just 



472 COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 

as we rise in moral and religious life by seeking and valuing 
Christianity above sectarianism. 

269. In organic nature, to which alone is it expedient to 
give attention at present, Three kinds of analogy are ob- 
servable. First, analogies of organization, which are the 
profoundest; second, analogies of external configuration, 
with or without similarity of internal structure; third, 
analogies of qualities, habits, instincts, &c. Frequently one 
kind of analogy presupposes and brings another, but it is by 
no means necessary to the existence of analogy that all three 
kinds, or even two of them, should be associated. The 
analogy between the different species and tribes of organized 
beings as to their internal structure, is the subject-matter of 
one of the grandest of natural sciences. If one thing more 
than another attests the unity of creation, it is Comparative 
Anatomy, Different as are the outward seemings of bird 
and quadruped, fish and reptile, and more different even yet 
those of the boneless creatures, leaving plants, for the time, 
altogether out of the question, nothing is plainer to the 
tutored eye than that all these varied beings are utterances 
of a single Divine idea. The likeness in the higher classes, 
the Vei'tebrata, is unanimously acknowledged in their name. 
The lower classes, negatively distinguished as the mverte- 
brata, differ unquestionably, in respect of that hard frame- 
work we call the skeleton, which in these no longer appears 
as a set of internal bones, but is replaced by a solid outer 
covering, well shown in the lobster and the crab. In regard 
to the viscera and the organs of sense, the analogy, how- 
ever, is obvious enough; and since so many affinities have 
been already demonstrated between these invertebrata and 
the higher classes, all pointing moreover to a common 
archetype ; the circumstance of their unlikeness in the matter 
of skeleton, and thence of configuration (as in the case of 
the star-fishes compared with birds,) stands only as a mys- 



HOMOLoaY. 473 

tery to be cleared up.* The advances which science has 
already made towards the solution, are sure in their promise; 
as the stars and the compass tell the mariner his prow is 
homeward, though the land be yet invisible. 

270. Homology is the name of the science which seeks to 
determine these deep affinities. The more usual application 
of the word is to the science of skeletons and their parts; 
but properly, it applies to all parts whatever of the animal 
structure, whether hard or soft. The idea intended to be 
conveyed by it is, that specific organs of animals, to appear- 
ance quite distinct, do nevertheless directly answer to one 
another, and are derivations from a common archetype or 
model. The arm of the human body is "homologous" with 
the fore-leg of the brute, with the wing of the bird, and with 
the pectoral fin of the fish. Essentially it is the same part 
which we see in each, but being intended to serve a different 
purpose in each different animal, is modified accordingly. 
The homologies just alluded to are called by Owen "special." 
He gives this name to all such affinities of diflferent parts or 
organs, in different animals, as demonstrably answer one to 
another. The least acquainted with animal structure may 
understand them, by comparing the hoof, the paw, the talon, 
and the human foot. "General homologies" form another 
and yet profounder class. These are the relations which the 
total of the structures of animals, in all their variety, bear 
to that grand, universal type of which Man is the proudest 
fulfillment, — the type termed the Vertebral, but' though in 
the vertebrated animals most consummately set forth, cer- 



* The bilateral symmetry of those curious shells cast upon our 
sandy shores, commonly known as "mermaids' heads," (zoologically 
Spatangus,) beautifully points from afar to the vertebral idea. See 
for an account of it, "Annals of Natural History," vol. 1, p. 30. 

40 » 



474 Owen's "serial homologies." 

tainly not confined to them. Every one may see tlie general 
quality of this type, by comparing the skeletons of quad- 
rupeds, tlie bird, and the fish. No animal has all the parts 
of the common archetype expressed in their maximum. 
Some have one part more highly developed, some have 
another; always, however, in a fixed degree, neither more 
nor less, whereby the specific identity of each is preserved 
pure. The wing, though an organ of the same archetype as 
the arm, never changes to an arm ; nor does the fin of the 
fish ever assume the character of a wing. Thirdly, Owen 
discriminates "serial homologies." These are the relations 
which the several parts of an animal bear among themselves. 
Comparing, for example, the bones of the leg with those of 
the arm, we pursue "serial" homologies; and again, Avhen 
we compare the bones of the spinal column with those of the 
skull, which latter the acute Oken has demonstrated beyond 
dispute, to be itself a chain of vertebrse, the various ele- 
ments of the several bones being so modified, expanded, or 
contracted, as to convert them into a fitting cavity for the 
brain. Homology is thus to analogy in general, what gram- 
mar and etymology are to the science of language, — a finer, 
more recondite, and more exact determination of its funda- 
mental truths. Obviously, without a careful and extended 
study of all three of its departments, our apprehension of 
the Unity of Nature can be no more than superficial and 
vague. Happily, this grand science is now kindling a lite- 
rature of its own, the light of which points and illuminates 
our way.* 



* See, for instance, Owen's Works "On the Homologies of the 
Vertebrate Skeleton," and on the "Nature of Limbs;" and the 
masterly article on the Skeleton in Todd's Cyclopcedia of Anatomy 
and Physiology, by Maclise. For a talented resume of the subject, 
see the London Quarterly Review, No. viii., July, 1855. 



COMPARATIVE ANATOMY OF PLANTS. 475 

271. Botany has its Comparative Anatomy as well as 
Zoology, all sound and scientific classification resting upon 
the resemblances of the different organs as to their essential 
nature, however widely diversified in seeming. Viewed 
homologically, the parts of which plants are composed are, 
like those of animals, exceedmgly few. The flower, with its 
various members, is only a fasciculus of leaves, similar to 
those of the stem, only more delicately fashioned, and beau- 
tifully colored ; the fruit is no more than another such fas- 
ciculus, curiously folded together, and distended or covered 
in with juice or pulp. The proofs of this are furnished, 
partly by the phenomena of double flowers, partly by the 
comparison of a large number of different species. In the 
double white water-lily, the double tulip, and often in the 
double camelia, every shade of transition may be traced 
between petal and stamen; in the double cherry-blossom, 
instead of a pistil, there grow two little leaves, exact minia- 
tures of the ordinary foliage; sometimes, even in single 
blossoms of the Anemone nemorosa, leaves similarly stand 
in place of germens. The identity of the petals and the 
calyx, and of the calyx and the stem-leaves, is shown by the 
polyanthus, in its different varieties; the latter also by the 
gentianella, and a variety not infrequently met with, of the 
common white clover. It is not that any given flower or 
fruit ever actually consisted of green leaves, and was formed 
from them by direct transmutation, but that the essential 
elements both of flower and fruit are varied and elaborate 
developments of a single organic form, which in a lower 
state of development would have been a simple twig of 
leaves. Every leaf in its embryo state is potentially a petal, 
potentially a stamen, potentially the carpel of a fruit, and 
it expands into one part or another according to the impress 
given it at birth, by the directive vital power. The term 
" metamorphosis," as applied to floral development, becomes, 



476 GENERAL MODEL OF PLANTS. 

therefore, incorrect. An organ once framed and determined 
is never converted into a different organ; there is simply a 
capacity on the part of the original germ to develope into 
one or another of many different shapes. The homologies 
disclosed by the different species of plants are most strikingly 
illustrated in the origin and structure of Fruits. In the 
apple, for example, we have five carpellary leaves, united 
and enclosed in pulp; in the fraxinella and the star-anise a 
similar combination, but without the surrounding pulp ; in 
the pseony, three or four such leaves, at once destitute of 
pulp, and instead of being united, perfectly independent and 
distinct, and apt, when withered and dried, and the seeds 
have fallen out, to expand into a close likeness of the green 
leaf The flowers of the different genera of Ranunculacese 
are scarcely less instructive. Only by the laAA='s of homology 
do we rightly understand Anemone, Clematis, Caltha, Trol- 
lius, Helleborus, &c., and learn that what seem to be petals, 
are in reality exalted calyx-leaves. Botany and Zoology 
will some day be found of singular mutual service in regard 
to their comparative anatomy. The homologies of the Ver- 
tebrata will be illustrated by those of the higher orders of 
plants, those of the invertebrata by the less perfect kinds. 
Nothing is plainer even now than that the general model of 
plants is upon the vertebral archetype. We find it in what 
is essentially the Plant, namely, the Leaf. It is in the leaf 
that the vegetable energies are chiefly exercised; it is from 
the leaf that all the floral organs are developed, and to the 
leaf that all parts are reducible by homology; the Leaf 
therefore may be regarded, as above said, the essential and 
prototypical Plant.* Taking, then, the essential plant, the 



* That a leaf is a perfect plant we by no means intend to say. A 
perfect plant is a highly complex organism, a structure built up of 



PLANTS FORMED ON THE VERTEBRAL ARCHETYPE. 477 

simple green' leaf, its normal and highest form is found to 
consist in a strong, central axis or midrib, giving rise to 
numerous lateral ribs, which diverge from it at certain 
angles, and establish the general figure. The interstices are 
filled with pulp, and the whole organism is enclosed in a 
skin. The essential parts of the flower, and of the fruit, the 
maximum stages of vegetable development, consist of this 
identical green leaf, folded vertically upon its axis, as on a 
hinge, so that the edges come in contact, each being a minia- 
ture of the cavity formed by the spine, the ribs, and the 
breast-bone. In the cavities thus formed, the highest ener- 
gies of vegetable life are concentrated, and the ends of that 
life accomplished. The stamens supply pollen ; the pistils, 
or organs of female function, contain seeds. Looked at, 
accordingly, from the plant, the body of a vertebrated crea- 
ture, or at least of any of the mammalian tribes, is seen to 
be an infinitely perfected Leaf; looked at from Man, the 
carpel of the fruit (the pod of the pea, for instance), folded 
with such fine symmetry on its little spine, is the miniature 
idea of the human frame, which is also folded, as it were, on 
the spinal column. Everything in nature shows more or 
less of the spinal column, a right and a left, standing side 
by side, and vertically united, since everything flows from 
the Good and the True, as conjoined in the Divine, and 
receives their dual and undivided impress. 

272. Guided by the light of these great principles, we see, 
then, that the kingdoms of organized nature are but mani- 
fold repetitions and modifications of one grand ruling arche- 



tnany distinct pieces, each with an allotted office of its own. It is in 
no case merely a leaf, nor even a twig, per se, because to the full and 
complete idea of a plant is needed not only distinct nutritive and 
sexual apparatus, but a descending axis or root, as well as an ascend- 
ing axis or stem. 



478 UNITY OF THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 

type of structure, divaricating on the one hand, into the 
idea realized in the perfect Animal, on the other, into that 
of the perfect Plant, the several members of each kingdom 
being allied, remotely to those of the sister kingdom, inti- 
mately and definitely to one another. Begin, as in former 
surveys, with the Vegetable Kingdom. In its aggregate, 
this is in reality the distributed exhibition of a single plant — 
a plant existing nowhere as a fixed, tangible individual, but 
everywhere as a theoretical or ideal one, having its parts or 
factors diflTused over the whole surface of the earth, in the 
infinitely-varied figures we call "species." Some species 
show one part in perfection, some show another, the ideal 
total being best represented where the largest number of 
parts occur in most symmetrical combination. It is not 
the more thorough completeness or excellence of any one 
organ in particular that gives superiority to a vegetable 
form, but the collocation of the largest number of distinct 
parts, well balanced and proportionate, and in nowise defec- 
tive or confused. That such an archetype governs the 
forms of the vegetable world, appears not only in completed 
parts, but conspicuously also in the g'Mosi-abortive or rudi- 
mentary development of certain organs in given species, 
which in other species expand to high perfection, and serve 
highly important purposes. It appears again in what are 
so viciously miscalled " monstrosities," as when the Linaria 
vulgaris, the pretty yellow toad-flax of our autumnal hedge- 
banks, makes those curious eflTorts to rise from the usual 
unsymmetrical corolla into the regular five-leaved form. 
Rightly regarded, the vegetable kingdom is thus — not what 
it appears at first sight, an assortment of discrepancies — but 
a grand whole, formed of an innumerable quantity of 
smaller parts, the mass presenting nothing diflTerent from 
what may be discovered in the individual, and the indivi- 
dual reflecting all the qualities of the mass. Every leaf on 



CELLULAR PLANTS. 479 

a tree is a tree in little ; the tree, in its turn, is a leaf, as it 
were, enlarged ; every variety in outline and structure, whe- 
ther of bud, or leaf, or flower, or fruit, is only another ut- 
terance of one primitive and ubiquitous idea. The very 
cells of which a plant is built are so many plants in minia- 
ture, having their own seasons, life, death, and renewal, and 
performing within themselves the whole series of vital func- 
tions. Thousands of plants consist of nothing more than a 
few such cells as in septillions make up an oak ti'ee, mere 
microscopic threads, yet in all the characteristic phenomena 
of vegetable life they are on a par. Such are the red-snow 
plant and its congeners, the various species of Palmella and 
Protococcus. " Whether," says Mohl, " they consist of a 
single cell, or as in the Confervas, of rows of cells united 
into a thread, each cell is capable of an independent exist- 
ence. It absorbs fluids from the surrounding medium, re- 
spires, and assimilates the absorbed substances ; in short, the 
simple vesicle suffices for the accomplishment of all the va- 
rious functions Avhich must cooperate in the nutritive pro- 
cesses of the plant." According to the closeness or other- 
wise of the analogy between particular forms, we have 
species, genera, tribes, classes, and so forth ; the skill of the 
botanist largely consisting in his ability to collocate such as 
to the less observant and sagacious appear alien. Where 
there is the greatest amount of real affinity, there is often 
the least apparent affinity, and vice versa; the progress of 
genuinely scientific Botany, as of every other department 
of natural history, consists in seizing the deep and perma- 
nent resemblances, and passing by the superficial and occa- 
sional. Narrowly looked at, the smallest mosses are found 
analogous with the tallest tree; the most insignificant of 
weeds with the choicest flowers ; Lycopodiums disclose ana- 
logies with firs and pines ; the gourd and cucumber plants 
with the passion-flowers ; water-lilies with poppies and Mag- 



480 UNITY OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 

nolias. Every great platform of plants is found in close 
analogy with every other platform. Looking from the out- 
side, the throne of diiference, to the inside, the throne of 
likeness, the same old, old fashion is ever present. There is 
nothing in Exogens which we do not find, prefiguratively, 
in Endogens, as when we compare the pine-apple with the 
cones of the fir tree; nothing in flowering-plants which we do 
not find among the flowerless. In the curious Brazilian fa- 
mily Podostemacese, especially in the genera Lacis and Mni- 
opsis, we see liver-worts and sea-weeds as it were in bloom. 
Twining plants have their forerunner in the fern called Ly- 
godium ; the Casuarinas of New Holland their precursors in 
the Equisetums. Nothing is more interesting than the simple 
resemblance of large and little. The Mucedines or mildew- 
plants, comprising the genera Penicillium, Botrytis, Asper- 
gillus, &c., form sometimes in the space of a square inch an 
immense forest of little trees from one to ten lines high, va- 
ried, but always elegant in their ramification, and bearing 
at the extremities of their whorled, umbellate, or panicled 
branches, bunches or heads of seed, producing the most ex- 
quisite effect. Growing on all sorts of substances, and in 
all latitudes, if they do not attract the eye, it is because 
without the microscope they are scarcely visible. What a 
new world do we owe to this wonderful instrument ! 

273. The Animal Kingdom, like the vegetable, is a grand 
whole, of which the smallest polyp is a perfect representa- 
tive. None are ignorant that every living creature eats, 
drinks, and propagates; that it is born, grows, lives, and 
dies, and has more or less means of intercourse with the 
external world. A moment's reflection makes it self-evident 
that such conformity of history implies a generally concur- 
rent likeness as to organization. Animalcules, a thousand 
of which do not exceed the bulk of a grain of sand, are 
essentially not difierent from the largest quadruped. They 



UNITY OP THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 481 

are composed of members equally well suited to their mode 
of life. Their actions display all the phenomena of instinct ; 
they move with surprising speed and agility, directed evi- 
dently by choice, and with a specific end in view. They eat 
and drink, and must therefore be supplied with a digestive 
apparatus ; they exhibit muscular power of the most extra- 
ordinary amount; they are susceptible of the same passions 
as the superior animals, though differing in degree; and the 
satisfaction of those passions is attended by the same results 
as in our own species. These and many other phenomena 
of the same nature indicate, beyond question, that they must 
be as highly organized, in their degree, as the Mammalia 
themselves. So full and exact are the analogies which unite 
the various provinces of the realm of animals, that while 
every inhabitant of a given platform is in general afiinity 
with the whole, it is in immediate agreement with particular 
forms occupying the platforms above and below. Every 
quadruped, that is to say, is in direct analogy with some 
bird, fish, reptile, and insect; partaking, it may be, more of 
the structure of one, more of the habits of another, more of 
the qualities of a third, but in every case definitely. For, 
as said above, we must never think of analogy as a matter 
purely of organic structure. Nature does not confine herself 
to a single mode of alliance; structure is one method, others 
consist in economy, to which, however, structure is always 
co-ordinated and predetermined. To the lowest members of 
the animal kingdom, as the sponges, Sertularias, and other 
"zoophytes," one great attribute of animals seems, however, 
to be denied, viz., the power of locomotion. But the unity 
of plan is only curiously varied. All the fixed animals are 
aquatic, so that the constantly changing element in which 
they live, incessantly brings new objects into contact with 
them. Unable to move personally, their world, which is the 
water, moves for them, as the atmosphere does for the trees. 
41 V 



482 ANALOGIES OF MAMMALS AND BIRDS. 

The sea-anemone, glued to a rock upon the shore, bathed by 
a thousand waves that come but once, is far more of a tra- 
veler than the worm crawling in the soil.* 

274. To illustrate the particular analogies of animals, we 
may adduce first, those existing between Mammals and Birds. 
The analogies in question have been noted from very early 
times. Naturalists were not long in finding out that the 
Quadrumana or monkey-family have their parallel in the 
Scansores or climbing birds ; the Carnivora in the Raptores 
or birds of prey; the Cetacea, or whales, in the l^atatores or 
swimming birds. Mr. Newman, in his treatise on the " System 
of Nature," sums them up most felicitously. Thus : — " The 
parrots among birds emulate the monkeys among placentals ; 
they eat all kinds of food that they can procure ; they obtain 
it in the same situations ; they seek it in the same way — 
by climbing — for a parrot does not run or leap like other 
birds, but like a monkey, climbs slowly and solemnly from 
bough to bough. Its foot is constantly used as a hand for 
conveying food to the mouth ; its chattering voice is also 
similar; its large brain and peculiar tact in imitation are 
still additional similarities." No less striking is the agree- 
ment between the carnivora and the birds of prey. What 
the lion and the tiger are among the former, the same — and 
in many more points than the thirst for blood, and the pur- 
suit of living quarry, — are the eagle and the vulture among 
the tenants of the air. So with the birds denominated the 
Insessores or Perchers, such as • the sparrow, the raven, and 
the thrush. These are the feathered analogues of that class 



* The Actinias are not absolutely fixed. Ordinarily so found, they 
have the power, nevertheless, of detaching themselves, and moving 
away. They do this either by slowly gliding along ; or by revers- 
ing the body, and using the tentacula as feet; or by inflating the 
body with water, and committing themselves to the waves. 



ANALOGIES OF REPTILES AND MOLLUSCA. 483 

of quadrupeds to which the mouse and the squirrel belong. 
" Many of them, are remarkable for their attachment to the 
residences of man; they perforate our walls, make their 
nests and bring forth their young in holes and crevices of 
our roofe; they are remarkable for boldness yet wariness; 
they are forever intruding, yet constantly on the watch; 
they are of small size, and infinite in number; they are 
merry, active, and playful. Who is there that has not com- 
pared the sparrow to the mouse?" Passing to other families, 
we see in the wryneck a feathered ant-eater ; the camel and 
the giraffe remind us of the stork and the ostrich; the pen- 
guins and the sea-gulls of the seals. Birds in general are to 
the rest of the vertebrata what Insects are to the inverte- 
brata. Both tribes of beings are remarkable for the lustre 
and variety of their colors: for their power of rapidly sail- 
ing through the air; for their high degree of respiration; 
and their extraordinary amount of instinct. In beautiful 
and ingenious architecture, the birds, the bees, and the 
wasps, have been competitors since the world began. 

275. In the inferior tribes of animals we have analogies 
precisely similar, as in the likeness of the shell-bearing 
mollusca, such as the snail, to certain members of the tribe 
of reptiles. As it slowly crawls along, with head and tail 
alone protruding, we see over again the general figure and 
proverbial slowness of the tortoise. The fish called the 
Tansy, or Blennius pholis, is remarkable for its skill in 
building nests like those of birds. "What makes this fish," 
says Mr. Gosse, "more than usually interesting is, that it is 
one of those species which construct an elaborate nest for 
the deposition of their eggs and the hatching of their 
young— 

Atque avium dulces nidos imitata sub undis ! 

In Mr. Couch's "Illustrations of Instinct" (p. 252 et seq.) 



484 THE STRAWBERRY-CRAB AND OTIRANG-OUTANG. 

the construction of the little dwelling, of fragments of coral- 
line and other sea- weeds, interwoven by silken threads, its 
suspension from an overhanging rock, the deposition of the 
amber-colored eggs, the habits of the new-born young, the 
danger they incur from predatory enemies, and the vigilant 
care of the affectionate parent, are well described." From 
the same author may be cited another curious history. 
"The Strawberry-crab (Eurynome aspera), so called from 
its being studded all over with pink tubercles on a white 
ground," he tells us, "is a climber. If it were a terrestrial 
animal, I should say its habits were arboreal. True, it now 
and then wanders over the bottom of its abode, with slow 
and painful march, but generally it seeks an elevated posi- 
tion. We usually see it in the morning perched on the 
summit of some one of the more bushy weeds of the Aqua- 
rium, as the Chondrus or Phyllophora rubens, where it has 
taken its station during the night, the season of its chief 
activity, as of most other Crustacea. While watching it 
climb," he continues, "I was strongly reminded of the 
Ourang-Outang at the Zoological Gardens ; the manner in 
which each of these very dissimilar animals performed the 
same feat was so closely alike as to create an agreeable feeling 
of surprise."* This crab resembles the monkeys also in its 
great length of arm, obviously an adaptation for climbing; 
seen also in the Sloths of South America, which are almost 
exclusively arboreal; in the Longicorns among beetles, 
which are essentially tree-insects ; and in the perpendicular 
web-makers among the Spiders. The Cephalopoda or 
Cuttle-fishes are preeminently the Felidse of the ocean. 
Lying in wait for living prey ; lurking in secrecy to spring 
upon it; feeding chiefly in the twilight or at night; their 



The A.quarium, pp. 127-131. 



FOSSIL PLANTS AND ANIMALS. 485 

strength and rapidity of movement render them formidable 
enemies to many of their fellow-inhabitants of the waters. 
They are, moreover, the chamseleons of the deep, having the 
power of rapidly changing the color of the skin as emergen- 
cies require. The Pteropoda (wing-footed), so called from 
the peculiar lateral appendages which constitute their prin- 
cipal means of progression, are the moths and butterflies of 
the sea. Insects in general, are represented there by the 
Crustacea, a tribe nearly allied to them. No true insect 
ever occurs in salt water. 

276. Fossil species no less than living ones attest the unity 
of organic life. Whether antediluvian or recent, there is 
only one system of structure, either for animals or for plants. 
"Throughout all formations, the grand truth to which every 
accession of geological discovery bears witness, is the prin- 
ciple of unity of plan. Even the most seemingly monstrous 
and incongruous forms of animated existence in past times, 
are all, without exception, constituted according to regular 
modifications of a common type, and with parts, organs, and 
functions, related by the closest analogies to one another; 
so that no sooner is a new specimen detected than it imme- 
diately finds its proper position in the scheme of nature. 
Whether an absolutely new form, or offering appearances 
intermediate, a place can be assigned to it, and this invari- 
ably too in such a manner that it either tends "to supply a 
link of affinity between orders of beings already related, or 
indicates some new and unexpected point of analogy."* 
Take a few examples. No living species of animals have 
wider intervals between them than those belonging to the 
Pachydermata, or family of the rhinoceros and elephant. 
But in the ages when the tertiary strata were deposited, this 



* Baden Powell, " Philosophy of Creation," p. 337. 
41 » 



486 UNITY OF ANIMALS WITH PLANTS. 

tribe of quadrupeds was far more abundant than now ; the 
fossil species supply the links which are needed to unite the 
existing kinds, and complete the series. Of the reptilian 
creatures we now similarly possess only a remnant. This 
earth was for thousands of years the abode of numerous spe- 
cies no longer to be found alive, the Ichthyosaurus, the Ple- 
siosaurus, and the Iguanodon; the fossil and the living 
taken together, make up the series to which they are mu- 
tually indispensable. The same Avith fossil plants. The 
Calamites of the coal-formation take their place in the exist- 
ing family of Equisetacese ; the Lepidodendra are interme- 
diate between living Lycopodiacese and Coniferse, approach- 
ing, however, more nearly to the former; and even the 
Sigillarias find, as far as the particulars of their organiza- 
tion are known, a definite place in the living flora that 
surrounds us. Nature, we thus learn, knows nothing of 
past and present. The relics of bygone ages are not relics 
of extinct systems, simply of extinct species. The trilobites 
and pterodactyles, the Sigillarias and the Lepidodendra, are 
as much a part of the chain of being as the zebra and the 
camel, the oak and the myrtle-tree, and are fiilly as essential 
to its completeness. 

277. That Animals and Plants taken together, form a 
whole, is a fact no less obvious than the unity of either king- 
dom considered separately. As organized beings, formed of 
solids and fluids, maintaining, and maintained by, an inces- 
sant cyclical action, born of a parent, or rather of parents, 
growing to a given bulk, feeding, sleeping, reproducing their 
kind, and on the expiration of their lease of life, dying, and 
giving place to their descendants ; the members of these two 
great realms are perfectly and in every point analogous. 
Every function in the one is so closely imaged in the other, 
that although in no case identically the same, it is impos- 
sible not to recognize them as determined by a common law. 



UNITY OF ANIMALS WITH PLANTS. 487 

Physiologically, they are one. The wide difFereBce in the 
general configuration of the two classes of beings takes no- 
thing from the integrity of the principle. The unlikeness 
in general form which on a superficial contrast, would keep 
asunder the quadruped and the tree, Avould on the same 
reasoning keep even further apart the mammal and the 
polyp. The unlikeness, after all, is not so great as we are 
apt to suppose. There is little resemblance, it is true, be- 
tween the totality of plants compared with animals; we 
must not expect that, because analogous, a menagerie and a 
flower-garden will be like seal and impression ; taking, how- 
ever, one object at a time, and though no analogue be 
straightway found, instead of throwing it on one side, pa- 
tiently and sanguinely persisting in the search, knowing 
what we look for, there is nothing in the world of animals 
for which a parallel may not be found in the world of plants. 
Examples of these parallels were cited in the chapter on 
Prefiguration, leadmg, as we there saw, to the transfer of 
animals' names to plants, and of plants' names to animals. 
It will suffice to add, that while plants, as a whole, occupy 
a platform beneath animals, so do their particular races, and 
even species, occupy specific places, each higher kind of 
organism standing, as it were, virtually above the next 
inferior, the mammal at the summit, the plant underneath, 
and probably a mineral below the plant. As the parrots, 
for instance, answer to the monkeys, so do the epiphytic 
Orchids to the parrots. They reside, like both classes of 
creatures, not upon the ground, as other plants do, but upon 
the boughs and branches of trees; the gaudy plumage of 
the parrots they almost surpass in the brilliant coloring of 
their petals ; the aptitude for mimicry in the monkeys they 
parallel in their extraordinary counterfeits of the shapes of 
insects, birds, and reptiles. It may be remarked here that 
Nature has her mountain-families, her sea-families, her river- 



488 GEOGRAPHICAL ASSOCIATIONS- 

families, and so forth, in every department. The monkeys, 
the parrots, and the epiphytic Orchids are peculiarly her 
threefold forest family, at least as regards the tropics. In 
the torrid zone the parrots are the principal of the birds 
which make their dwelling in the woods; they rarely de- 
scend to the ground, and numerous individuals, fill the 
forest with their disagreeable cries. Similarly, the monkeys, 
so well adapted for a life in the woods, by the structure of 
their bodies, and the nature of their food, numerous also 
botli in species and individuals, live almost entirely in the 
trees. In the forests of tropical South America, the Orchids 
are described as growing in myriads, adorning the living 
trunks as it were with jewels, and rendering the prostrate 
beautiful even in death. 

278. In no light does the analogy of plants and animals 
appear more striking, than when we compare the great 
natural groups into which they are scientifically divided. 
In both there is a common archetype, but in both there are 
many sub-types, the latter being the ground of the distinc- 
tions of tribes, orders, classes, genera, and so forth. Ordi- 
narily, the animal world is divided first into Vertebrata and 
Invertebrata ; or animals with a spine, and internal skeleton, 
such as man ; and animals destitute of a spinal column, and 
with their bony part on the outside, as in the case of the 
crab. Plants, after the same manner, are primarily distin- 
guished by almost all, into the two great classes of Phseno- 
gamia and Cryptogamia, or flowering and flowerless, the 
former distinguished by their consj)icuous stamens and 
pistils, or reproductive apparatus; the latter by the appa- 
rent absence of these parts. The Cryptogamia comprise the 
ferns, sea-weeds, lichens, and similar plants; the Phaeno- 
gamia include all kinds of trees, shrubs, and the remainder 
of the herbaceous vegetation of our planet. In both cases 
the negative is intensely deceptive. We might as reasonably 



QUATERlSrARY SYSTEM OP ORGANIZED BEINGS. 489 

divide animals into radiate and non-radiate, or plants into 
fungoid and non-fungoid, as say "vertebrate" and "inverte- 
brate," "flowering" and "flowerless." The invertebrate 
tribes of animals, and the flowerless tribes of plants, are in 
no sense natural, coherent, and symmetrical groups. So far 
from it, they difier among themselves quite as widely as in 
the collective from the vertebrated and the phsenogamous. 
The true distinction to begin with is the quadruple, namely, 
of Animals into Vertebrata, Articulata, MoUusca, and Ka- 
diata; and of Plants into Exogens, Endogens, Cormogens, 
and Thallogens.* The Vertebrata comprise man, quad- 
rupeds, birds, fishes, and reptiles : the Articulata, insects in 
all their variety, together with the crustacean animals, such 
as the crab and lobster ; also the centipede, the earth-worm, 
and similar creatures : the Mollusca comprise the slug, the 
snail, and the inhabitants generally of shells, whether fresh- 
water or marine, univalve or bivalve : to the Radiata belong 
the star and jelly-fishes, the sea-anemones, the coral-creatures, 
and most kinds of animalcules. These last are all of them 
aquatic. The four great provinces of the Vegetable King- 
dom are equally intelligible, even to the least practiced. 
"Exogens" comprehend all those trees and plants which 
have the wood forming their stems deposited in concentric 
layers, so that the section shows beautiful rings ; the veins 
of their leaves are netted; their flowers and fruit are con- 
structed on a quinar}'- type; and the embryo of the seed is 
provided with two seed-leaves. Such, for example, is the 
strvicture in the oak, the apple, the olive, and the rose; the 
first, the most perfect realization of a forest-tree; the second 
of a fruit-tree; the last of a lovely flower. "Endogens" are 



^ The two latter groups together form what some authors call the 
Acrogens, but to view them as one is certainly incorrect. 



490 EXOGENS AND VERTEBEATA 

of lower development. The section of the stem presents dots 
instead of rings ; the stems are rarely provided with branches, 
and instead of bark have only a hardened surface ; the veins 
of the leaves are straight and parallel instead of netted-, 
perhaps the leaves themselves are in general only the parts 
which in Exogeas are simply the petioles, the lamina being 
liere undeveloped; the plan of the flowers and fruit instead 
of quinary, is ternary; and the embryo has a solitary seed- 
leaf. Lilies and grasses of all kinds are endogenous, and in 
the tropics, the number is swelled by the stately Palm-trees. 
" Cormogens " have their noblest representatives in the Ferns ; 
plants destitute for the most part of aerial stems ; destitute 
also of true flowers, but provided with elegant green 
"fronds," which serve at once for leaves, and to bear the 
fructification, the curious and characteristic brown bars or 
spangles developed on their under surface. To the same 
province belong the Lycopodiums, the Equisetums, and the 
Mosses. Fourth and last, the "Thallogens" comprise the 
singular, universally difiused and familiar plants called 
Lichens, Fungi, and Sea-weeds. None of these plants have 
proper stems, leaves, or -blossoms. They are simple masses 
of cellular tissue, and are scarcely ever of a green color; 
gray, yellow, red, purple, or white, replace the verdure we 
find in every other race. 

279. Now those four great classes of Animals, and four 
great classes of Plants, — acknowledged by all the best sys- 
tematists to be strictly "natural," — answer to one anoUier ex- 
actly. The Exogenous plants are the vegetable analogues 
of the Vertebrata; the Endogens of the Articulata; the 
Cormogens answer to the Molluscous creatures : and the 
Thallogens to the Radiate. The details of the several ana- 
logies would require a volume ; a word upon each is all that 
can here be given. The agreement of the Exogens with the 
Vertebrata is known to most; it is one of the first facts 



FERNS AND MOLLUSCA. 491 

which the philosophic naturalist finds appealing to him. 
To illustrate that of the Endogens with the Articulata, 
which is little less conspicuous, it will suffice to point once 
again to the insectiform flowers and the aerial habitats of 
the Orchidese. The analogy of the Mollusca with the Cor- 
naogens is not so palpable till scrutinized; — it is hard to 
think that the shells upon our mantel-pieces can have any- 
thing in common with ferns and mosses. When, however, 
we compare the nalced molluscs, such as the slug, with the 
essential part of the fern, — ^which is not so much the frond, 
as the rhizome or root-stock from which the frond arises, — 
the mystery begins to clear. Take, for instance, the rhi- 
zomes of the different species of Davallia, and of many of 
the genus Polypodiimi, as they lie, slug-like, upon the sur- 
face of the earth. In the ramosum they are streaked ; 
those of the vespertilionis crawl over the edges of the flower- 
pot. The analogy becomes further evident when we com- 
pare the fronds themselves with the peculiar respiratory ap- 
paratus found in the Mollusca, and called their "branchiae." 
The fronds of the fern, it will be remembered, are the respi- 
ratory apparatus of the plant, and therefore analogous to 
the branchiae. These latter, like the ferns, are often deli- 
cately branched, and stand to the body of the creature just 
as the fronds do to the rhizome. Such is the case in the 
Nudibranchiate molluscs, delicate and fragile little creatures 
found crawling on corallines, sponges, and sea-weeds, and 
usually of the most charming and diversified colors. Their 
branchiae are beautifully arborescent, in many species doubly 
and triply pinnate, resembling the fronds of the Davallia or 
of the Polypodium Dryopteris, and disposed either in a star- 
like circle, as in the genera Doris, Polycera, and Miranda, 
or in a double row down the back, as in the Tritonia (or 
Dendronotus) arborescens. This most elegant little •creature 
has a body of about two inches in length, supporting seven 



492 MUSHROOMS AND JELLY-FISHES. 

or eight pairs of its fern-like plumes, those towards the head 
being the largest, and those nearest the tail the smallest. 
It is met with on the shore, in crevices of rocks, and upon 
sea-weeds, &c., almost throughout the north, or from Green- 
land to the English Channel, and again on the north-east 
coast of America. The reader interested in knowing more 
of these curious and unregarded, but exquisite little beings, 
theoretically, may consult the admirable monograph of 
Messrs. Alder and Hancock, published by the Ray Society. 
How the analogy between the Radiata and the Thallogens 
is determined, may readily be understood on a comparison 
of the higher fungi, such as the mushroom, with the jelly-fishes. 
Every one who has seen these latter lying stranded on the 
shore, will remember their circular configuration. We have 
it markedly also in the opened Geastrum and the star-fishes. 
Most of the crustaceous lichens, and the fructification uni- 
versally, show circles and radiations ; and how common this 
is with the polyps is unnecessary to say. In the beautiful 
white laminated coral, the Fungia agariciformis, we can 
hardly persuade ourselves that we do not see a petrified 
mushroom; as for the analogy of the Algse with the Ra- 
diata, every one at first sight takes the Sertularias for Sea- 
weeds. 

280. While the innumerable facts which disclose these 
grand analogies, testify, in so doing, to the Unity of Nature, 
they are u:nanswerable evidence against the hypothesis of 
the Continuous Chain. Vertebrates unquestionably stand 
at the head of the animal kingdom, man, considered zoolo- 
gically, being their niaximmn; and Exogens as plainly stand 
first among plants ; the descent, however, from these down 
to the lowest, is not by a single line, but by many lines di- 
verging in widely separated directions. No tribe, either of 
plants or of animals, can be said to be absolutely at the bot- 
tom. Though the Radiata and the Thallogens are placed 



TROPICAL SEA-WEEDS. 493 

there in schemes of classification, a considerable portion of 
them are far superior in their development to species be- 
longing to the higher tribes. Every tribe, in fact, both of 
animals and plants, possesses, as said before, an extremely 
wide range of form, higher kinds and lower kinds, the for- 
mer always superior to the lower ones of the adjacent tribes. 
Like the columns of the orders of architecture, they begin 
in simplicity, but are crowned with sculptured capitals. 
We may construct a continuous chain by taking the vari- 
ous tribes of beings in their aggregates, and placing them 
according to the dignity of their maximum developments ; 
but such a course is impossible with subtribes, genera, and 
species. In short, if we seek to arrange things in a strictly 
arithmetical succession, we not only depart from the true 
order of nature, but outrage it. The Radiata have as 
good a claim to be put second as the Articulata, and the 
Mollusca as good a claim as the Radiata; similarly in 
plants, the highest of the Cormogens, or the Tree-ferns, are 
incomparably better entitled to be placed next the Exogens, 
than many Endogenous genera, the duck-weed for example, 
which hides the water of stagnant ponds ; and the same is 
the right of the magnificent sea-weeds of the Indian and 
Antarctic oceans. The D' Urvillea, when cut transversely, 
presents zones, with divisions resembling medullary rays, 
and a sort of pith ; a similar appearance is observable in- 
deed in the well known olive-brown alga of our own shores, 
the laminaria digitata, or Sea-tangle, one of the giants of 
the marine forests, as regards Europe. Lamouroux claims 
four distinct parts for its stem, analogous in situation, or- 
ganization, and relative size, to the epidermis, bark, wood, 
and pith of Exogens. 

281. The true position of the subordinate provinces of 
the two great realms of organic nature, with regard to the 
chief or typical province; also the relation which the subor- 

42 



494 EACH ARCHETYPE A KIND OP SUN". 

dinate provinces bear towards one another; and the relation 
again of the whole of either series to its correlative, plants 
to animals, and animals to plants — the following diagrams 
will serve perhaps to make plain : — 

Articulata. Endogens. 

VEETEBEATA. EXOGENS. 





Mollusca. Eadiata. Cormogens. Thallogens. 



Here we have the Vertebrata and the Exogens the centre 
of their respective systems, the subordinate tribes equidis- 
tant from them, each with its lowest forms on the remote 
confines, and its highest next the archetype. Each arche- 
type is, as it were, a Sun, transmitting its rays in three di- 
rections, and with equal force and effulgence in every one of 
them. The nearer we stand to the luciferous orb, the more 
sensible we are of its qualities; the further we travel away 
fi'om it, the fainter becomes the light. Leaving the apple 
and the rose, for instance, among Exogens, we come, accord- 
ing to the point of departure, to the palms among Endo- 
gens, to the tree-ferns among Cormogens, or to the great 
tree-like algse of the southern seas, among the Thallogens. 
These form, as it were, the inner circle. Next we come to forms 
of each tribe less elaborately developed, and thence gradually 
pass outwards to the simplest of each kind, the humble 
dwellers at the "ends of the earth." The Articulata and 
the Endogens, the Mollusca and the Cormogens, the Radiata 
and the Thallogens, may be placed in any one of the three 
stations; it matters not which lie upon the right, or which 
upon the left; the essential point is their equidistance from 
the centre. 

282. The distribution into 'fo^lrs is not confined to the first 



TRUE IDEA OF FORM. 495 

great provinces; every one of these latter is again divisible 
into a principal and three subordinate, and there is ample 
reason to believe that it is the same again with every one of 
these. Doubless, the further we push in our inquiries, 
the greater becomes the difficulty of determining these 
normal centres, and what characters shall be deemed indica- 
tive of superior rank; but it is certain that every principle 
of nature runs through the whole of nature, — that every type 
and institution is repeated on every platform, though we 
may be unable to make it out upon the instant. Nature 
does not disclose all her secrets at once; every generation is 
allowed its share of insight; an infinite amount is reserved 
for those unborn. Take, for instance, the Vertebrata. The 
highest of these are the Mammalia, or animals that suckle, 
their young; the remainder are the three obvious and well- 
known groups, Birds, Fishes, and Reptiles, all of which 
stand equally near to the Mammalia in their higher forms, 
while no one of them is absolutely the lowest. We may 
repeat here that in the true idea of the Form of an object 
is involved not merely its structure, or that part of its na- 
ture which the anatomist is concerned with ; it includes also 
the whole of the qualities and dispositions which pertain to 
it, and which distinguish it socially from other things. And 
this, in fact, is its essential nature, being that which gives it 
a place and function in the general economy of creation; 
thus the object and end for which it was created. The End 
is always nobler than the Means, for the means are only 
processes whereby the end shall be attained. In all our 
groupings and classifications, therefore, we should view the 
organic structure as intermediate between the Artist and 
the End he has in view. Put in a diagram, the four classes 
stand thus: — 



496 THE MEANS AND THE END. 

Birds. 

MAMMALIA. 



Fishes. Eeptiles. 

Among plants, after the same manner, the great, primary 
province of Exogens resolves into 

Calyciflorse. 
THALAMIFLOE^. 



Corolliflorse. Monochlamydese. 

The reciprocal relations are in these minor classes precisely- 
analogous to those of the larger divisions. As Exogens 
answer to Vertebrata in the first analysis, so, in the second, 
the Thalamiflorse answer to mammals. 



CHAPTER XXYII. 

MAJf TBE EPITOME OF NATVME. 

283. In the forms, properties, analogies, and discrete dis- 
tinctiveness of the three great kingdoms of objective nature 
is set forth the whole philosophy of Life and Mind. Here 
are represented and expounded the threefold expression of 
the Divine life, the threefold composition of the human 
soul, and all those other sublime trilogies of the universe 
which declare Him who by wisdom framed the worlds. 
When, therefore, we would study life, when we would study 
metaphysics, psychology, or any of the profound and spa- 
cious themes which deal with facts not obvious to the senses, 
our best and shortest way is to begin with studying Natural 
History, or the science of minerals, vegetables, and animals, 
their forms, relations, uses, and correspondences. The study 
of the three kingdoms of nature is in effect the study of 
Man, who, being the image of God, is the finite archetype 
and summary of all things, the world over again, at once its 
lord and its epitome. The world is threefold because man 
is threefold. In the constitution of human nature is written 
the rationale of its entire scheme and order — yea, of every- 
thing it contains. If man were not what he is, and if he 
were not the immediate and personal work of God, though 
there might be a world, it would be as different from the 
world which now exists, as man himself would be different 
from what Almighty Wisdom and Goodness have created 

42* 497 



498 INTELLECT CONTINGENT UPON THE WORLD. 

him. The primary, essential reason of the world's being 
what we find it is, of course, the Nature and the Will of 
God. Every divinely originated object is a result of which 
the Supreme reason lies far back of man, far back even of his 
intelligence and imagination. Still, it is man that we must 
look to as the explanation of the world's existence — he is the 
proximate reason, the point at which our inquiries are at 
once stayed and rewarded. Why man is the summary 
and proximate reason of the world, is that he shall be a 
happy dweller, in the end, in the mansions of the heavenly 
presence. He cannot become this unless he have an intelli- 
gence commensurate with his glorious destiny, and such in- 
telligence he can only possess by learning the nature and 
will of God as expressed in material, objective forms. In 
other words, to realize our sublime destiny we must first 
learn to know and love Him who has provided it ; but this 
we can only do through the medium of the finite and mate- 
rial. Only through this medium is God knowable at all. 
Without an objective world, rich and gorgeous as our own, 
the idea of God could not be conceived. "As there are no 
infinite media, no signs that express the infinite, no minds, 
in fact, that can apprehend the infinite by direct inspection, 
the One must appear in the manifold ; the Absolute in the 
conditional ; Spirit in form ; the Motionless in motion ; the 
Infinite in the finite. He must let forth his nature in 
sounds, colors, forms, works, definite objects and signs."* 
Not that because of this distribution of the Divine nature, 
we are to think of it as a congeries of separate and sepa- 
rable elements. No. It is perfect and indivisible Unity, 
variously exhibiting itself, or in diverse aspects and mani- 
festations, according to the design to be accomplished. We 



* " God in Christ," by the Eev. Horace Bushnell, p. 139. 



INTELLECT CONTINGENT UPON THE WORLD. 499 

never see only a part of God's nature. He is present in his 
full totality, in every leaf upon the tree ; in every little but- 
terfly and shell. 'Not personally, but by the communication 
of his Life. Nature is not God, neither is God nature. 
Nature is the Divine Art, expressed in material configura- 
tions and phenomena ; God reigns apart from it, in the hea- 
vens. While true, then, that but for the Intellect of God 
there could not have been a world, it is no less true that the 
intellect of man is contingent upon the world. In order 
that as intelligent beings we may appreciate and enjoy our 
eternity-life, we must abide for a given period in the school 
of the time-life, or the ' material world, using it, and fulfill- 
ing its duties. This we can only do by being in unity with 
it. Things can only use what surrounds them by virtue of 
such a relation. Plants can only assimilate mineral matter 
by virtue of their having a mineral side ; animals can only 
assimilate vegetable matter by virtue of consanguinity with 
the vegetable; man, were he not both animal and plant, and 
man besides, could make no use of either. He is competent 
both to apply the world to his physical use, and to love it, 
and profit by it, spiritually, because he is its entire nature 
epitomized and concentrated. It is because they are want' 
iug in this plenitude of relation that brutes are incapable of 
heaven, and make no use of the world except as a place for 
eating and drinking. Man would be as short-lived as they 
are, did not the laws of the world pre-exist in his own nature, 
and but for this also he would be as blind and speechless. 
Language, narrowly looked at, is in its every word a spirit- 
ual echo and reflection of the world outside; its every atom 
primarily denotes something objective, or at least physical. 
" It is only as there is a Xoyoq in the outward world, an- 
SAveriug to the Xoyoc: or internal reason of the parties, that 
men can come into a mutual understanding in regard to 
any thought or spiritual state whatever." For the same 



500 MAN THE MICROCOSM. 

reason, every great poem that deals freely and profoundly 
■with external nature, is a " Kosmos " of the spiritual nature 
of man. None have so largely helped forward the true sci- 
ence of metaphysics as the poets, who have stood face to 
face with nature, and sung about her splendors, 

284. Such is the idea of man intended in his ancient name 
of microcosm, or "little world," — a name approved by greatest 
thinkers. " Fantastically strained," as Lord Bacon observes, 
"by Paracelsus'and the alchemists," who made it the ground 
of their astrological speculations, the idea has to a certain 
extent lost favor in modern times. There are not wanting 
even despisers of it. " Paracelsus,"' says the author of the 
History of the Literature of Europe, " seized hold of a notion 
which easily seduces the imagination of those who do not 
ask for rational proof, that there is a constant analogy be- 
tween the macrocosm of external nature, and the microcosm 
of man." Misconceived and misapplied as it was by the 
arch-mystic, the doctrine has at no time been in the least 
degree falsified. Rather does it acquire new strength with 
the growth of science, aided often by those who are least 
conscious of their services. Dating from the oldest philoso- 
phers, it receives its best illustrations from the newest. 
Every man who seeks to obey the golden aphorism, " Know 
Thyself," finds in his own nature reiteration of the world at 
large ; he finds it, both physiologically, in his body, and 
spiritually, in his soul. " Man's body," in the words of a 
popular writer, " contains the elements of all knowledge." 
Its chemistry is wonderful, and embraces all chemistry ; its 
geography is equally so ; its seas and its rivers are even more 
wonderful than those of the earth ; its temperature contains 
the whole theory of combustion. All knowledge, all taste, all 
sense of right and wrong, is comprehended within the sphere of 
the microcosm, man. He who knows man thoroughly, is both 
learned and scientific, and what is better than either, he is the 



ANALOGY OF MAN WITH TREES. 501 

truly wise man." " In man," we are told by another, " all the 
powers and realities of the universe are concentrated, all de- 
velopments united, all forms associated. Man is the bearer 
of all the dignities of nature. There is in nature no tone to 
which his being is not the response, no form of which he is 
not the type. The human organism is the whole xoafio(;, 
with its life infused into the individual. Man's organization 
embraces all ; he is the world's self-surveying eye, the world's 
self-hearing ear, the Avorld's self-enouncing voice. Hence 
he is termed by Goethe the plan of creation ; by Novalis, 
the systematic index to nature ; by Oken, the complex of all 
organizations."* 

285. Of all subjects open to the human mind, it follows 
that the Unity of man with nature is the most lofty and in- 
structive. If true that he is one with it, then the study of 
man must needs be the study of all nature, and conversely, 
as said at the outset, that of nature must be a microscopic 
view of man, free access to every side and aspect of him. 
No subject defines so vast a circle. It embraces the whole 
of metaphysics, and the whole of the philosophy of Lan- 
guage, which is equivalent to saying the entire range of the 
correspondence of things spiritual with things material. It 
embraces the whole of zoology, of botany, and the sciences 
of nature in general, making all things fill with life, and 
bringing all into an unexpected fellowship. In every sense 
of the word, it is seZ/-knowledge. " The man who does not 
find in animals younger brothers, and in plants cousins more 
or less removed, is unacquainted with his own nature." 
How beautiful the analogy of man with Trees ! His physi- 
ology is pictured in them ; they have members, organs, and 
tissues; the pendent, fl.exile branches of many kinds are 



* Stallo, Philosophy of Nature, p. 107. 



502 ANALOGY OF MAN WITH TREES. 

transcripts of the locks and ringlets of the head, as those of 
the silver-birch, called by Coleridge "the lady of the woods ;" 
the gnarled and knotted oak reminds us of masculine stur- 
diness and muscles. The old botanist, Curtius, has a chap- 
ter De arborum memhris, et illorum cum Jiominis memhris 
conformitate,* imitated by Laurenberg in one De Analogia 
plantas et hominem.'f Poetical minds dwell on it enthusias- 
tically, as Sir Uvedale Price, in his book on the Picturesque ; 
" The luxuriance of foliage answers to that of hair ; the 
delicate smoothness of bark to that of skin, and the clear, 
even, and tender color of it to that of the complexion." 
Then he shows us how the youth of a tree corresponds with 
the youth of our own species, each being made beautiful by 
its freshness, which gives way, however, with lapse of years, 
to dryness and wrinkles. "By such changes, that nice 
symmetry and correspondence of parts, so essential to beauty, 
is in both destroyed ; in both, the hand of time roughens the 
surface, and traces still deeper furrows ; a few leaves, a few 
hairs, are thinly scattered on their summits ; the light, airy, 
aspiring look of youth is gone, and both seem shrunk and 
tottering, and ready to fall with the next blast."J A pas- 
sage in the elegant " Poetics" of Mr. Dallas, well deserves 
appending. "Almost every page," he observes, "that 
Wordsworth has written, bears token of his belief that be- 
tween man and the flowers of the field there is a close alli- 
ance, — that man is indeed a Tree, endowed with powers of 
self-knowledge and self-movement ; — a faith shared by many 
besides, but entered into by none more entirely, unless by 
George Herbert ; a faith which is nowhere more strongly or 



* Hortorum, Lib. vii., cap. 1 — 15. 1560. 
f Apparatus Plantarum, cap. 7 — 12. 1632. 
X Pp. 94, 95, Lauder's Edit. 1842. 



THREE KINGDOMS OF THE HUMAN BODY. 503 

more frequently affirmed than in the assurances of Holy 
Writ, and which the legendary lore of Daphnes and Ariels, 
together with our love for trees, and the way in which we 
lament their downfall more than that of anything else not 
human, proves to be deeply seated in every bosom." 

286. The unity of man with nature in respect of its 
three kingdoms is marked, first, in the structure of his cor- 
poreal frame; secondly, in the triple action of his life. 
Begin with the body. Here we have one of the most won- 
derful analogies in creation. The abdominal region, the 
lowest part of the body proper, is our mineral kingdom : the 
chest, with its leafy lungs, and life-giving heart, the source 
of aliment to every member, is our vegetable kingdom ; the 
head, with its beautifully-moving face, and restless brain, 
supported by the chest, as the chest by the inferior part, is 
to the remainder of our fabric what animals are to vegeta- 
tion and the soil. Every part is needful to the well-being 
of every other part. As vegetation efiects important and 
salutary changes in the earth and atmosphere; and as ani- 
mals are at once givers and recipients, in regard both to the 
plant-world and to the mineral ; so is it with the three king- 
doms of the human body. The need of plants to the earth 
in regard to the promotion of rain, and of the earth to plants 
as an anchorage and source of food, is but a varied u.tterance 
of the sympathies of our own organization. Man himself 
is as necessary to the earth as the earth is necessary to him; 
the same is true of the corporeal members that represent 
them. 

287. As in external nature, by the law of promotion, 
every superior platform carries with it the essential qualities 
and powers of all that have gone before, so is it in nature's 
Epitome. As the plant has the mineral idea in it, the 
peculiar glory of the vegetable being superadded; and as 
the animal has the vegetable idea in it, with again a brighter 



504 THE HUMAN HEAD. 

dignity superinduced, whereby it feels, and moves, and be- 
comes capable of social intercourse; so into the chest, or 
vegetable region of the human body, are continued the 
attributes of the earthly or abdominal region; and into the 
head or animal region, the attributes of both the others. 
There is nothing either in the structure or the functions of 
any portion of his body, but is in the Head of man recapitu- 
lated and reiterated, and m every case under a nobler and 
purer guise. Tlie limbs and their activities reappear in the 
muscles of the face, and that lively play of the features 
which gives it variety and expression. The digestive system 
reappears in the mouth, wherein the whole process of feeding 
is at once begun and representatively completed, the jaws 
and teeth taking their place as representatives of the hands, 
— the prehensile organs by which the food has in the first 
instance been procured. The nose re-enacts in little the 
duty of the lungs, and the function of the respiratory appa- 
ratus in general. On the lips are beautifully spiritualized 
the idea and circumstances of sexual love.* The eyes in 
their mighty grasp of total nature, a microscope one mo- 
ment, a telescope the next, renew and concentrate the 
powers given by the sense of touch, and the aptitude for 
locomotion, bringing as it were, the whole surface and whole 
mechanism of the body to a single point. Hence their 
beautiful roundness, since whatever in the universe exhibits 
a totality, is invariably a Sphere. In that wonderful frame- 
work, the human Head, are collected accordingly, symbols, 
representatives, and metaphors of every organ and sign of 
Life. The body is the first and ruder synthesis, the head 
the last and finest. Here all the powers and elements of 
nature converge, as all the light and colors of creation 



* Kat 17 /ij'fij avTT! yXvKcia yivcTai Toiv {pvx<Sv. Aristmnetus, Epistles, 2, 7. 



THREE DEGREES OF HUMAN LIFE. 505 

meet in the grand focus of the Sun. Most naturally is it, 
then, that in the face are afforded those entertaining disclo- 
sures which indicate man's hold within himself of the 
organization and inmost nature of every creature of zoology. 
AVhen the features of the monkey, the sheep, the bull, sup- 
plant, as we often see them, those of the proper human 
countenance; when the mildness of the dove, the cunning 
of the snake, the stupidity of the ass, paint themselves on 
the physiognomy of our fellows, it is because in man they 
are all essentially contained; and though their normal and 
complete realization is outside of him, are yet competent to 
look forth from the windows. 

288. With the three great kingdoms of the bodily fabric 
correspond, in turn, the three great factors of our humanity, 
the Sensuous life, the Rational, and the Religious, — forms 
of activity which have each of them their distinct place and 
special office in the soul's economy, as minerals, plants, and 
animals have theirs in the economy of the world. The sen- 
suous life is the mineral degree of human nature; the rational 
life is the vegetable degree; the religious life is the animal. 
The first, like the solid earth on which we stand, sup- 
plies the other with a footing; the rational life is that 
pleasant green sward of our existence to which belong the 
innumerable little thoughts and emotions of daily life, 
amiable and intelligent, worthy and beautifiil, but still only 
secular and temporal; the life of religion is that which, 
lifting us into the sphere of the heavenly and immortal, 
crowns and consummates the others, as animals complete the 
glory of God's creation. Wanting either of these three 
lives, human nature would be imperfect, nor could we exist 
without any one of them for a single instant; for though 
man may refuse to exercise the life of religion, the power to 
do so still flows into him from God, and is an integral part 
of his vitality as a human being. Neglecting the privileges 

43 W 



506 THREE DEGREES OF HUMAN LIFE. 

of the two higher lives, man degrades himself into the con- 
dition of a mere globe of inanimate earth and water ; caring 
only for the sensuous life and the rational, he is a mere 
world of trees and plants, useless because there is no animal 
to feed upon them. 

289. Between these three lives there are discrete degrees 
as decided as those of material nature. There is no con- 
tinuity between them, any more than between mineral and 
plant, or between plant and animal ; each preserves its own 
plane of beginning and of end. Hence the impossibility of 
a man ever becoming rational who attends only to the plea- 
sures of external sense; or religious by the mere culture of 
intelligence and morality. It is no more possible than to 
procure flowers by sowing crystals, or birds by planting 
acorns. But though severed by discrete degrees, the three 
lives are intimately bound together, the highest mediately 
beholden to the lowest. All, moreover, are good, and excel- 
lent in their degree, because every one of them has its own 
dignifying duty. The religious life is intended to minister 
to our Maker ; the rational to the religious ; the sensuous to 
the rational; each lower life thus, eventually, to ends of 
piety and the praise of God. There is no greater mistake 
than to contemn or disparage the sensuous life. Whatever 
is subservient to delight of sense, is conducive, while used 
temperately, to the best interests of humanity. The perfec- 
tion of a Christian character does not consist in ignoring and 
despising the sensuous, which 'at no time can it practically 
dispense with, but in honoring all things in their proper 
places and degrees, rejecting none, but regenerating all. 
Educators have much to learn in respect of this. How 
foolish, for example, the doctrine which would persuade a 
girl that beauty is valueless, and dress only vanity. It is 
false altogether. Beauty is of value; so is dress, and of 
great value. The thing to teach is their just yaliie; that 



VALUE OP THE SENSUOUS LIFE. ^ 507 

there must be something beneath the dress, and interior to 
the beauty, better than the silk and the rosy cheek, and 
without which they are truly no more than rags and ugli- 
ness. To dress tastefully and prettily is one of the first and 
finest of the fine arts ; elegance of attire is a part of the very 
method and style of nature; clothed in our very choicest, 
we are still not to compare with the lilies of the field. Using 
the sensuous life aright is taking the crystal from the quarry, 
and converting it into a magnifying lens. Unimpaired in 
itself, the investiture of it with the new and higher use en- 
hances the loftiest pleasures of our philosophy. Everything 
in the sensuous life may be made beautiful and poetical if 
we will bring it up into our higher thoughts, instead of 
sacrificing those higher thoughts to it ; for the sensuous life, 
like the world, does not so much want subjugating, as right 
using. Men say "nature" teaches them to do so and so, 
and excuse even licentiousness on the plea of following 
nature. Very good. We can never do better than follow 
and obey nature. But it must be an enlarged, not a partial 
survey of nature that we must take. The partial study 
makes it seem natural to abide in the sensuous ; the enlarged 
study shows that it is infinitely more natural to come out of 
the sensuous, or rather, to value it only as the basis. No- 
thing is lost of the enjoyment of it, by finding "nature" as 
much in the rational and the spiritual life. While the 
sensuous life, thought of for itself alone, too often becomes a 
sensual, and thence a vicious life; and thence again, full of 
dangers and anxieties, and usually ends ill, perhaps in rot- 
tenness and rags, or at least in a peevish and despicable 
discontent; the property of the spiritual life, thought of first, 
and of the rational life, duly honored, is to infuse itself into 
everything below, giving an unexpected zest to the enjoy- 
ment even of the merest animal pleasures, so that the volup- 



508 VIRTUE DEVELOPED BY SOCIETY. 

tuary, who pities and despises what is above him, after all, 
misses his own aim and expectation. 

290. So with the rational life. If it be foolish to despise 
the sensuous, a thousand times more foolish is that dis- 
esteem of the secular and intellectual which is often thought 
so helpful to true piety. The Bible requires the abasement 
of nothing on the part of man beyond his preposterous self- 
ishness and pride. The design of our Lord, in his divine 
teachings, is to make us, not religionists, but perfect men. 
This he does not propose to do by the suppression of any 
part of our nature, but by developing the whole. "If it 
could be proved that Christianity interdicted the exercise 
of the intellectual life of man in the very slightest degree, it 
would have as little of the truthful, the heavenly, and the 
practical in it, as if it forbade the theological element." It 
never can be religion to contemn and disregard what " God 
so loved" as to visit in order that he might redeem it. To 
forsake the world is to miss its highest usefulness. The 
hermit may have few vices, but he can have no genuine and 
lively virtues, for these are only developed by social con- 
gress. It is worthy of note that the most exquisite produc- 
tions of Art are precisely those which approximate to the 
representation of spiritual, intellectual, and sensuous beauty 
in a single subject. The best artists are those who can 
receive and apply this great truth, that the beau ideal of a 
Christian character is the regenerated triple nature. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

INSTINCT AND HE AS ON. 

291. The brilliant instruction we derive from considering 
the three great kingdoms of nature as a trilogy answering 
to the threefold expressions of the Divine Life, is most 
largely realized when we turn our minds to the contempla- 
tion of Instinct and Reason, a true idea of which forces is 
not possible until that instruction be listened to and applied. 
As there are three expressions of life, so are there three 
great classes of phenomena. Those of the lowest degree of 
life, or the life of inorganic nature, are the domain of Che- 
mistry and Physics; those of the physiological, or inorganic 
expression, constitute the Instincts ; those of the spiritual 
degree disclose Reason. The first are identified with the 
mineral world; the second with plants and animals, in- 
cluding the material body of man, or his temporal and ter- 
restrial nature ; the third pertain peculiarly to himself, since 
he alone is concerned with the immortal and celestial. 
Each degree of life prefigures the next above; chemical 
phenomena prefigure instinct ; and instinct beautifully pre- 
figures reason ; but like minerals, plants, and animals, which 
are their pictures, they are altogether and eternally distinct, 
because between each there is the barrier of a discrete de- 
gree. Never, therefore, was there a greater mistake than 
that of Helvetius, Condillac, Smellie, and those other au- 
thors who contend that reason is no more than the maximum 
development of instinct ; in plain English, that " reason " 
43 « ■ 509 



510 INSTINCT CO-ORDINATE WITH LIFE. 

means "more instinct," and " instinct" "less reason," This 
is virtually to deny that there is any difference between man 
and brute, and thus to pronounce both of them imperfect. 
The doctrine arose, without doubt, from the false notion of 
a continuous chain of being. 

292. Instinct, accordingly, in its true idea, holds a much 
larger signification than the performance of certain ingeni- 
ous works, cognizable by our senses. It does not consist 
simply in those actions and trains of action which books on 
the subject of instinct ordinarily confine themselves to, such 
as the nest-building of birds, and the hunting, by the new- 
born infant, for the mother's breast. For technical pur- 
poses, it may be useful so to restrict the term, but viewed 
philosophically, instinct is co-ordinate and co-extensive with 
life itself. The actions commonly called instinctive are ex- 
hibitions in a wider form, of the very same formative energy 
which previously moulds the various organs of the body, 
and maintains them in their functional activity. This is 
strikingly illustrated in the operation of the " constructive" 
instincts, such as impel to the fabrication of coverings, 
clothing, and the various kinds of dwellings, all of which 
are a kind of ultimated and externalized organization. 
God is the organizing framer and preserver of the world of 
living things ; instinct is the method by which his energy 
takes effect. It is the general faculty of the entire living 
fabric, underlying and determining all activities which tran- 
spire, either invisibly in the organs themselves, or as played 
forth to observation ; thus bearing exactly the same relation 
to the general structure which the constructive chemical 
forces bear to the crystal. Instinct, in a word, is the opera- 
tion of Life, whether promoting the health, the preserva- 
tion, or the reproduction of an organized frame, or any part 
of such frame, and whether animal or vegetable. "The 
law of instinct," as Mason Good well puts it, " is the law of 



TWO DEGREES OP INSTINCT. 511 

the living principle; instinctive actions are the actions of the 
living principle, pervading and regulating organized matter 
as gravitation pervades and regulates twiorganized matter, 
and uniformly operating, by definite means, to the general 
welfare of the individual sj^stem, or its separate organs, ad- 
vancing them to perfection, preserving them in it, or laying 
a foundation for their reproduction, as the nature of the 
case may require. It applies equally to plants and to ani- 
mals, and to every part of the plant as well as to every part 
of the animal, so long as such part continues alive."* Vi- 
rey uses similar terms — " Internal impulses of life constitute 
acts of instinct in plants the same as in animals. . . . 
We distinguish, therefore, two degrees of instinct, first, that 
of the interior functions, or of the mechanism or organiza- 
tion ; secondly, that of the spontaneous outward impulses." 
Garus also, when he calls upon us to observe how a plant 
" through internal instinct, and under external relations, un- 
folds itself from an obscure and insignificant seed." To the 
same efiect writes the eminent physiologist. Dr. Laycock. 
" Inherent," says he, " in the primordial cell of every organ- 
ism, whether it be animal or vegetable, and in all the tissues 
which are developed out of it, there is an intelligent power 
or agent, which acting in all cases independently of the con- 
sciousness of the organism, and whether the latter be en- 
dowed with consciousness or not, forms matter into machines 
and machinery of the most singular complexity, with the 
most exquisite skill, and of wondrous beauty, for a fixed, 
manifest, and predetermined object — namely, the preserva- 
tion and welfare of the individual, and the , continuance of 
the species. This g"Masi-intelligent agent works with an ap- 
parently perfect knowledge of number, geometry, mathema- 



Book of Nature, Series 2, Lecture iv. 



512 TWO-FOLD OBJECT OE INSTINCT. 

tics, and of the properties of matter as known to the human 
intellect under the term ' natural philosophy' or physics — 
that is to say, with a perfect knowledge of chemistry, elec- 
tricity, magnetism, mechanics, hydraulics, optics, acoustics — 
but as far transcending the limited knowledge of the hu- 
man intellect as the structure and adaptations of living or- 
ganisms exceed in beauty and fitness the most finished 
works of man I take it as an established prin- 
ciple that the quasi-intelligent agent which operates in the 
construction of organisms, directs the use of the organs con- 
structed."* Between the work of simple " vitality" or " vi- 
tal power," as it is customary to call it, and the externalized 
operations popularly understood by the term Instinctive, 
there is thus no real difierence but that of method and prox- 
imate object. It is the same force which first clothes the 
bird with plumage, and then impels it to build its beautiful 
little nest, and line it with soft feathers. The essential unity 
of the two classes of phenomena may readily be apprehended 
by comparing their final purposes, which are in every point 
alike. Whether we take the operations of simple "vitality," 
so called, or those of palpable, externalized " instinct," in the 
popular sense of the word — all have reference either to the 
temporal welfare of the individual, or to the continuance of 
the species. Self-maintenance and propagation of the kind, 
are the two grand purposes for which the mediate or physi- 
ological expression of life is communicated by the Almighty 
to his creatures. From the first moment of their existence, 
plant and animal alike are actively employed in building 
up organs, repairing waste, and keeping the whole system in 



* See for a full and admirable exposition of the views enunciated 
in the above extract, the article on the Brain in the British and 
Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Keview for July, 1855. 



THE "divinity THAT STIRS WITHIN US." 513 

lusty health, unless hindered by extraneous obstacles. A 
portion of their vital energy is simultaneously directed to 
such activities with regard to surrounding objects, as shall 
complement those transpiring within the fabric. No new 
principle is employed in the effectuation of those activities ; 
they are the application of the one common law and method 
of life to the furtherance of the same common designs, only 
on a grander scale, and hence Avith organs often specially 
provided. The two kinds of phenomena taken together, 
form the system of vital economy by which the organism 
and the species alike endure. Doubtless, man may train 
and turn the usages of instinct to a different purpose, but 
wherever it is undisturbed by the influence of human rea- 
son, the predetermination is essentially to one or other of the 
two offices that have been mentioned. The force, called by 
its right name, is the life of the " Divinity that stirs within 
us," but for whose continued influx into every organ and 
cell of plant and animal, they would instantly dissolve. 
Truly was it said by the philosophers of old, Deus est anima 
brutorum. God is the life of the brutes, and no less so of 
the lilies of the field. Virgil is not so wide of the truth as 
some have fancied, when he says that the bees have in them 
a portion of the Divine mind. If " in Him we live and 
move, and have our being," how much more the helpless 
creatures of the plain, whose dependence, we should do well 
to note, is an infinitely greater truth than their mdepen- 
dence. Not that the creature is a mere cup into which life 
is poured despotically though benevolently. Though all 
creatures depend on God, they are still required to co- 
operate with him. God does one part — He does everything 
in reality, but one part more peculiarly — the other is ap- 
pointed to the creature to effect as of itself. To this end 
are instituted what men call the "laws of nature." Every 
living thing is put in a certain relation with the external 

w» 



514 INSTINCTS AND OUTWARD STIMULI. 

world, and tlie whole of the external world has an express 
relation with every living creature ; the economy and the 
very existence, both of the total and every atom, being 
made to depend on the mutual adaptation, and on the per- 
sonal activity of every part. The instincts are not played 
forth purely by the Divine life, arbitrarily swaying and 
ruling the creature. They are always in response to certain 
stimuli from without.* We experience every day that im- 
pressions made on the organs of sense, or on peculiarly sen- 
sitive parts of the body, induce muscular acts, sometimes ex- 
ceedingly complex, and absolutely independent of the will. 
Often it happens that such impressions give rise to actions 
which are not only involuntary, but are performed uncon- 
sciously. The vital activities which constitute Instinct, 
whether interior or externalized, are referable to identically 
the same origin; they are grounded, that is to say, in the 
process designated by the physiologists, " remote sympathy." 
The extremities of the nervous filaments, which terminate 
chiefly on the surface of the body, receive impressions cal- 
culated to excite them ; thence those impression are commu- 
nicated, by a succession of nervous influences, to the muscu- 
lar organs, which acknowledge them, and reply by perform- 
ing certain movements on a definite plan. The spider 
weaves its web, and the bee constructs its honeycomb. 
Briefly, particular impressions, conveyed by nerves to the 
nervous centre they have peculiar reference to, call forth 
particular acts, seemingly deliberate, but in reality uncon- 
scious. What these acts shall be, and what purpose they 



* The well-known opinion of Sir Isaac Newton, that the actions 
of brutes are under the constant, direct, and immediate direction of 
the Deity, is answered with all the care and respect which it de- 
serves, though with a leaning in its favor, in the Dialogues on 
Instinct of Lord Brougham, 



FOUR GREAT CLASSES OP INSTINCTS. 515 

shall subserve, is no longer a physiological question; they 
belong to the inmost life of the creature, the seat of the 
reception of the Divine love. That the proximate source 
of at least the externalized acts of instinct, is the "remote 
sympathy" above spoken of, is illustrated by the errors 
which instinct sometimes commits. The moth burns its 
wings in the flame of the candle; Blumenbach's ape pinched 
out the painted drawings of beetles from a book on Ento- 
mology, and ate them. Such acts cannot be referred to the 
Deity: they belong purely to the weakness of the finite. 
The sensational stimuli of the instincts, both in brutes and 
mankind, may be seen fully described in that masterly per- 
formance, the Principles of Physiology of John Augustus 
Unzer. (Sydenham Society's Vol., 1851.) 

293. The particular phenomena of Instinct are referable 
to four great classes ; namely, the instinct of Self-Preserva- 
tion, the instinct of Self-defense, the instinct of Propagation, 
and the instinct of Love to ofispring. It would be easy to 
show how these operate in the very inmost economy of or- 
ganic life, but it will suffice here to speak of them as ulti- 
mated into "instinct," popularly so termed. The first is that 
which leads every living creature to seek and consume food, 
to sleep and otherwise cherish itself, also, in many cases, to 
construct dwellings and traps for the capture of prey, and 
to migrate to milder latitudes during the winter. The skil- 
ful artisanship of the industrial classes of the Insect world, 
as the bee, the ant, and the wasp, illustrates this instinct in 
its maximum; the minimum pertains perhaps to the serpent 
tribe, in which few examples of ingenuity have been noticed. 
To this instinct, it may be added, belong the greater part of 
those wonderful and entertaining anecdotes which form the 
bulk of most treatises on the theme before us. The second 
instinct, that of Self-defense, is illustrated in the use by 
various creatures, of those natural weapons with which they 



616 SPECIAL INSTINCTS. 

are armed in case of assault, as the sting, the talon, and the 
teeth. The ejection of poison belongs to the same series, 
along with the paralyzing shock of the electric eel, and the 
shrouding ink of the cuttle-fish. Here also are to be referred 
the anecdotes of pretended death by many of the lower 
animals when closely pursued, especially insects; and of the 
hiding of others in retreats of the same color as themselves. 
Birds, for example, often protect themselves by keeping 
close to the ground, the color of their plumage rendering it 
difficult to perceive them till they rise. In the instinct of 
Self-defense are likewise comprehended all those interior 
operations of "vitality" which provide the different species 
ef living things with a panoply of protecting skin. The 
maximum operation of this appears in the scales of fishes, 
in the armor of the rhinoceros, in the carapace of the turtle 
and the tortoise, and in the shells of the mollusca. Hair, 
fur, wool, feathers, &c., are so many varied modes of effec- 
tuating the same principle. The instinct of self-defense is 
much more lively in brutes than it is in man. So serious 
are their exposures to danger, and so limited their powers of 
perceiving it, that it is made to operate in them with a force 
only equaled by its instantaneousness. The most interesting 
example is presented perhaps in the well-known timid cau- 
tion of the elephant, which will never cross a bridge without 
first trying its strength with one foot. The third of the 
leading forms of instinct, the instinct of Propagation, com- 
prises that long, beautiful, and most interesting episode in 
the history of life which, beginning with the selection of a 
mate of complementary sex, underlies all the delights and 
energies of existence, and is the means, under Providence, 
whereby "the face of the earth" is "renewed." In connec- 
tion with this instinct is best illustrated the law of special 
instincts, i. e., the particular modifications of the general or 
ftindamental one whereby the whole of its intent becomes 



J 



INSTINCT OF PAIRING. 517 

gradually and surely effectuated. Such an instinct is that 
of pairing, one of the most admirable in nature. Every 
species of animal, where the rearing of the young requires 
the attention of both parents, is subject to it; all such birds, 
for example, as build their nests in trees. The young of 
these birds are hatched blind, and bare of feathers, so that 
they require the nursing care of both parents till their eyes 
are opened and they are able to fly ; to this end the male 
feeds his mate as she sits brooding on her eggs, and cheers 
her with a song. Another of the special instincts belonging 
to the general one of Propagation,^pecially deserving notice, 
is that by which the sexes draw near at such periods of the 
year as will cause their young to be ushered into the world 
precisely when their food is most abundant. Though the 
time of gestation varies so widely in the different species of 
herbivorous quadrupeds, previous things are so ordained that 
the young appear early in summer, when grass is plentiful; 
the lambs and the young goats, which are born after a five 
months' gestation, come with the first steps of spring, be- 
cause they love short grass, such as a foal or a young cow 
could scarcely live upon. The young of pairing birds are 
similarly produced in early summer, when the weather is 
warm and genial, and they have a long season before them 
wherein to grow and become vigorous, and able to resist the 
cold of winter. With the exception of Henry Home of 
Karnes, who gives a chapter to it in the Sketches of the 
History of Man, (Book 1, Sect, vi., Appendix,) authors have 
treated this wonderful instinct with a neglect quite unac- 
countable. Other special instincts belonging to this class, 
eminently interesting to contemplate, though like the last- 
mentioned, commonly overlooked as regards brutes, are 
those of modesty, chastity, and conjugal fidelity. The last 
gives efficiency to the instinct for pairing, and is indispensa- 
ble to the nurture of the young, wherever this devolves 

44 



518 INSTINCT OF PLANTS. 

upon both parents; modesty animates the same instinct in 
its beginnings, and gives it delicacy and bloom. The most 
faithful of the animals below man are the pairing birds; the 
most modest is the elephant. The last of the four geat 
Instincts, Love to oifspring, is like Self-preservation, one of 
the principal centres of anecdote. The animal world over- 
flows with that beautiftil impulse to which we every one of 
us owe our being, — that sweet, unworded passion, only in a 
weaker form, which induces the mother to hold her offspring 
whole nights and days in her fond arms, and press it to her 
bosom with silent gladness. If there be one thought more 
touching than another, when the roll of half a life-time has 
either given or denied us a pretty little one of our own, it is 
that of the patient, yearning, unreckoned hours when we 
lay unconscious on our mother's knees. Poor, tedious, wail- 
ing, unthankful little animals, she at least cared for us and 
prized us, and though unsightly and uninteresting to all 
the world beside, saw in all our little face all the beauty of 
the angels. 

Our first and sweetest nurture, when the wife 
Blest into mother, in the innocent look 
Or even the piping cry of lips that brook 
No pain nor small suspense, a joy perceives. 
Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook 
She sees her little bud put forth its leaves. 

294. The instinct of Plants is similarly played forth in 
maintenance of the individual, and propagation of the spe- 
cies. To these ends they are endowed with a variety and 
an elaborateness of curious impulse quite as high, in propor- 
tion to their sphere of being, as that which is observable in 
the Animal Kingdom. Except as objects of nomenclature 
and classification, plants, ordinarily, are little cared for; 
they are passed by as destitute of all that makes animals so 
interesting; feeling, consciousness, volition, undoubtedly they 



TENDRILLED AND TWINING PLANTS. 51 9 

are short of; their economy is nevertheless so strangely like 
our own, that it is no wonder a few enthusiasts in every age, 
as Empedocles among the ancients, and Darwin and Dr. 
Percival* among the moderns, have fancied them suscep- 
tible of pleasures and pains, emotions and ideas. As with 
animals, there is in plants both an inward vitality and a 
series of externalized actions, complementing the interior 
ones, the two together making up the sum of the vegetable 
economy. Wherever the health and well-being of the indi- 
vidual, or the efficient play of the reproductive forces, may 
be involved, we find the one grand general principle of 
Instinct in operation. It is not peculiar to any particular 
part of the plant; it pertains to the whole, and resides in the 
whole, operating at every point, according to the exigency. 
As examples of the externalized instincts of plants, may be 
cited the ingenious methods whereby such as possess stems 
too weak to stand upright without assistance, manage, never- 
theless, to lift themselves into the air. The sweet-pea and 
its congeners, the passion-flower, the bryony, the vine, and 
many others, efiect this by converting the extremities of 
their leaves, or a portion of their flower-stalks, into tendrils, 
with which they clasp their stouter neighbors, often stretch- 
ing a long way in order to reach them; the Virginian- 
creeper puts out curious little organs like hands, having a 
sucker at the end of every finger, by means of which it 
attaches itself to its prop; other slender plants are found 
twining spirally, as the hop, the convolvulus, and the wood- 
bine, each kind adopting the particular method of climbing 
for which its organization more especially adapts it. The 
tendrilled plants are destitute of these organs while young. 



* Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manches- 
ter, Series I., Vol. 2. 



520 INSTINCTS OF SOME AQUATIC PLANTS. 

and at first the twining plants grow vertically; the instinct 
only comes into operation when the occasion for it arises. 
The wonderful instincts of certain aquatic plants, as the 
Ruppia maritima, and the Vallisneria, are well known to 
every botanist. The first-named curls its flower-stalks spi- 
rally, so as by coiling and uncoiling, according to the chang- 
ing depth of water, to keep its blossoms on a level with the 
surface. The other, the Vallisneria, produces its male and 
female flowers on different plants ; at the nuptial season, the 
former detach themselves, and floating about upon the 
stream, join company with the females. The innumerable 
curious facts familiar to the phytologist in regard to the 
germination of seeds, the sleep of plants, the power of accom- 
modation to adverse circumstances, and other such points in 
vegetable history are, properly, illustrations of Instinct, and 
should be treated of in the same way as the quasi-reasoning 
acts of brutes. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

IKSTIN^CT A.ND ME AS ON CONTINTTXIJ). 

295. Instinct, belonging to tlie physiological expression 
of life, or that which animates organized material forms, 
has no other end or function than the maintenance of those 
forms; whence, moreover, it never operates without mani- 
festing ejSects in the organic mechanism: Reason, on the 
other hand, has no relation to the body, except as the soul's 
lodging and instrument; it belongs to the soul, purely and 
abidingly, and may be exercised without giving the slightest 
external token. Instead of framing bodily organs, and ori- 
ginating physical offspring, and inducing the various phy- 
sical acts on which these two great aims depend for their 
effectuation, it spans the sciences, sails deliciously through 
the heavenly realms of poetic analogy, penetrates the signi- 
ficance of things, and looks into the very mind of God him- 
self. The life whose phenomena are the instincts, impels us 
only to eat, to drink, to propagate, to preserve our fabric 
safe and sound ; the spiritual life, the phenomena of which 
are forms of reason, gives power, not to do corporeal things, 
but to think, and to rise emotionally towards the source of 
life. It is by reason of this supra-instinctive life that man 
stands as the universal master. God, in creating a being 
who can be at once cognizant of his Creator and of himself, 
appoints him vicegerent over all. "Man thinks," says 
Buffon, "hence he is master over creatures which do not 
think." With adaptitude for thinking comes power of 

^ 44 « 521 



522 THE SOURCE AND CENTRE OF MAN'S DESIRES. 

spiritual desire. In brutes (that is to say, where the in- 
stinctive expression of life is all) there is nothing which 
reaches further than temporal, terrestrial, purely physical 
wants; man aspires to spiritual and invisible things; he 
desires the delights of intelligence, emotion, and imagina- 
tion; the source and centre of all his desires, however 
unconsciously it may be to himself, being heavenly and 
divine. They come of the soul's insatiable and inalienable 
need of God. "This sentiment," as finely said by Victor 
Cousin, "the need of the Infinite, is the foundation of the 
greatest passions and the most trifling desires. It is the 
infinite that we love, while we believe that Ave are loving 
finite things, even while we are loving truth, beauty, virtue. 
And so surely is it the infinite itself that attracts and charms 
us, that its higher manifestations do not satisfy us till we 
have referred them to their immortal origin. A sigh of the 
soul in the presence of the starry heavens, the passions of 
glory and ambition express it better without doubt, but they 
do not express it more than those vulgar loves which wan- 
der from object to object in a perpetual circle of anxious 
desires, poignant disquietudes, and mournful disenchant- 
ments." If brutes in any case had spiritual desix'es (which 
is tantamount to the possession of reason, seeing that these 
two faculties are complementary to one another) they would 
worship. The feeblest glimmering of reason among the most 
ignorant and savage of our race, is expressed, without ex- 
ception, in acknowledgment and adoration of an unseen 
power, some " Great Spirit," before whom they bow them- 
selves, whose favor they seek, and whose frowns they fear 
and deprecate. No brute thus approaches its Maker, nor is 
it able. The ox, in its rich pasture, never raises its eyes in 
gratitude towards heaven; it spends its whole existence in 
purely material satisfactions, and desires nothing beyond 
herbage and drink. It is from the same aptitude to think 



INSTINCT IN MAN. 523 

of and to love God that man alone is able to appreciate his 
transcript in the splendor and sweet beauty of outward 
nature. However exquisite the organs of sense may be in 
brutes, "eyes have they, but they see not; ears have they, 
but they hear not." As tersely expressed by the old poet, 

vovg bpS Kal vovs aKovei' t aWa Kuxpa Kai ru0Xa. 

'Tis mind alone that sees and hears ; all things besides are deaf and 
blind. Epichaemus. 

296. This, it is, accordingly, the spiritual degree of life, 
peculiarly characterized by capacity for rising to its source, 
which distinguishes between man and the brute. Man has 
the instinctive life, the same as the brute ; but he has the 
spiritual life in addition. He has it by virtue of his possess- 
ing a "spiritual body," so organized as to receive con- 
sciously the divine love and wisdom, and to be able to reflect 
them back upon their Almighty giver in the shape of admi- 
ration of his works, and worship of him as Father and 
Saviour. This it is which, establishing a distinction be- 
tween human nature and the very noblest of brute natures, 
such as no exquisiteness or complexity of mere physical or- 
ganization can be compared with for a moment, keeps them 
infinitely more distinct than animal and plant, or even or- 
ganic and inorganic substance. Though there is one life, — 
the instinctive, common to all organic things ; here is 
another, the spiritual, peculiarly and unapproachably 
human, so that though plants may be charming, and ani- 
mals beautiful, man alone can be sublime. What glorious 
privileges attend this life! We do not think of it, but 
everything superior to the mere gratification of bodily ap- 
petite and provision for physical wants, comes of our being 
gifted with a spiritual organism, receptive of spiritual life ; 
in fact, it is this very same divine gift which separates man, 



524 POWERS GIVEN BY THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 

even as to his animal form and nature, from the brutes. 
How varied and beautiful are the attitudes he can assume ! 
No animal can deport itself as man does, nor can any ani- 
mal but man move in the graceful undulations of the dance. 
Embodiments, each one of them, of a single and separate 
principle, brutes can do just one thing, concordant with 
their simplicity ; man, as the compend of the world, can do 
all things. Another striking fact of the same nature is, that 
while the eyes of animals are always of the same color in the 
same species, the human eye, the symbol of human intellect, 
is of the most beautiful diversity. The only brute in which 
there is a tendency to variety in this particular, is the horse, 
which animal, it will be remembered, is in the Word of 
God, and therefore in nature, the representative of intelli- 
gence.* Man, for the same reason, is the upright animal. 
While other creatures have their faces turned earthwise, he is 
dvdpco7iO(;'\ " the looker upwards." 

Pronaque ciim spectent animalia csetera terram, 
Os homini sublime dedit, coelumqne tueri 
Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus. 

(While other animals bend their looks downwards to earth, He 
gave to man a lofty countenance, commanded him to lift his face to 
heaven, and behold with upturned eyes the stars. — Ovid, Met. i. 
84—86.) 

■Lactantius, in reference to these celebrated lines, contends 



* That the curious white-haired varieties of many animals, called 
Albinos or Leuccethiops, have pink eyes, the white rabbit for example, 
argues nothing to the contrary, because the Albino condition is ab- 
normal. See the article " Albino" in the Penny Cyclopaedia, or the 
article " Eye" in Todd's Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology; 
p. 161. 

•j- irapa rd avco aOpciv, according to Plato, 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF DISCRETE DEGREES. 525 

that the erect form of man is palpably a proof of his being 
designed to look upwards alone, that whatever tends to at- 
tract his attention to merely terrestrial objects, is contrary 
to his nature.* To the spiritual body of man is likewise to 
be referred his possession of a /ace. Other animals, as Pliny 
observes, have only some kind of muzzle or beak. Hence, 
too, that other eminent characteristic of man, the visibility 
of the mouth. " With wild beasts and cattle," says Apuleius, 
in his Discourse on Magic, "the mouth is low-seated, and 
brought down to a level Avith the legs ; it lies close to the 
grass on which they feed, and is scarcely ever to be seen ex- 
cept when they are dead, or in a state of exasperation, and 
ready to bite ; whereas in man you look upon no feature be- 
fore this, when he is silent ; and on none more frequently 
while he is in the act of speaking." The same is the origin of 
the variety of the human voice, so different from the mono- 
tony of that of brutes, and even from the most perfect sing- 
ing of a bird. The cries and notes of the inferior animals, 
serve on this account, as the well-known bases of their names, 
in every language, both ancient and modern ; cuckoo, peewit, 
/?oyCj /?o///3oc, &c. The great distinction between the human 
voice and the brute is that the former is adapted to articu- 
lation. No brute can divide its voice as man does, whence 
the ancient Homeric epithet of " voice-dividing man." All 
these things are illustrations of Discrete degrees. Whether 
we take attitude, countenance, or voice, the ending of the 
brute idea is absolut^, the beginning of the human entirely 
new. 

297. Man, it was said in the preceding paragraph, has 
the instinctive life, the same as the brute ; he has it, how- 
ever, as much more amply as in organization he is superior. 



* Divinarum Institutionum, Lib. 2, cap. 1 . 



526 ENNOBLEMENT OF INSTINCT IN MAN. 

Flowing, as it does, into a frame so mucli nobler than that 
of the brutes, it assumes, in its new recipient, a proportion- 
ately nobler nature. The law of promotion, above described, 
whereby principles and faculties lifted from a lower platform 
to a higher, are there applied to new and greater purposes, 
here finds not only confirmation, but its most conspicuous 
example; the very instinct which carries brutes only to 
physical ends, in man leads to moral ones besides. Hunger, 
for example, which in brutes impels simply to eat, invites 
man to social gatherings whose object, at least collaterally, 
is the " feast of reason." The brutes feeding together on the 
grass, do no more than feed ; to men the highest delight of 
meal-time is their cheerful and salubrious company and 
conversation. Eating, as such, is at the best, a finite plea- 
sure ; it has none of that savor of the infinite which all true 
and great pleasures must needs possess ; but it gives occa- 
sion for such pleasures to be developed, and hence becomes 
in man, a noble function. " I did not calculate the gratifi- 
cation of those banquets," says Cicero, " by the pleasures of 
the body, so much as by the meetings of friends and con- 
versations. Well did our ancestors style the reclining of 
friends at an entertainment convivium, since it carries with 
it a union of life."* How marked, again, in respect of the 
instinct of propagation ! The brute fulfills the physical end, 
and ceases there ; man goes further, — he loves, and becomes 
human in proportion as he loves honorably and faithfully. 
Mere animal love is a very low pleasure ; were he incapable 
of any higher, man would never have become even civilized. 
"Happily directed and controlled," says Feuchsterleben, 
" love is the artist of the most exquisite spiritual develop- 
ments that human nature is susceptible of; whereas he who 



* De Senectute, Cap, 13. 



i 



INSTINCT OF LOVE OF HOME. 527 

never loves, becomes egotistical, mean, narrow-minded, 
covetous, and but too often, an unnatural sensualist." So 
with the instincts of conjugal fidelity, love to oiFspring, and 
that exalted and beautiful one, the love of Home. They 
lead brute and man alike into states of physical well-being ; 
in man, when properly developed, they are seeds no less of 
moral, intellectual, and even religious welfare. How many 
blissful emotions arise out of the instinct of Home ! The 
bird seeks its nest simply for shelter ; man, after the toils of 
the day, goes homeward, not merely to sup and rest himself 
but to feel in the bosom of affection, and in the sweet prattle 
of his little flock, that to Mm it is still the Golden Age. " To 
Adam and Eve Paradise was home ; to the virtuous among 
their descendants home is Paradise." Many things which 
appear to belong to the spiritual degree of life, are thus, in 
reality, only high developments of the Instinctive. To dis- 
tinguish between the two, we have but to ask concerning any 
particular faculty. Is it possessed both by man and animal? 
However lustrously a given faculty may shine in man, if we 
find it anywhere among the brutes, it is still no more than a 
part of the instinctive life. " We may rest assured," says 
Sidney Smith, " that whatever principles in the shape of in- 
stincts are given to animals for their preservation and pro- 
tection, are also instincts in man ; and that what in them is 
a propensity or desire, is not in him anything else."* Should 
we be at a loss to know whether a given faculty be thus 
shared, the place of its origin and its nature are determina- 
ble by its End, For it is not in working for a purpose ; not 
in the mere contemplation of results, and adjusting things 
thereto ; not even in the perception of cause and effect, — 
that man differs from the brute; — it is in working for a 



* Principles of Phrenology, p. 123. 



528 HUMAN INSTINCT EXPANSIVE AND CUMULATIVE. 

purpose having relation to the spiritual and immortal, and 
in contemplating causes and issues that lie altogether be- 
yond the reach and bearing of the physical. Every instinct, 
however, in man, prefigures and presignifies a sentiment be- 
longing to the spiritual life. Amativeness, for example, the 
seat of which is the (pw^^r^ (common to all living creatures,) 
is' found over again in the Tiveujia (which man alone pos- 
sesses,) in the shape of spiritual and unsensuous love. It is 
the same idea, moulded on a higher type. The correspon- 
dence between our higher and lower nature is one of the 
most wonderful features of our humanity. Every man who 
will watch himself, may see his animal, sensuous, external 
manhood, duplicated within, in higher workmanship. 

298. Instinct, in man, is not only applied to higher pur- 
poses ; it is expansive and cumulative. These, indeed, are 
the characters by which it is peculiarly distinguished from 
the instinct of brutes, which remains the same from age to 
age, as expressed in every attempt at definition. Why thus 
expansive, will appear when we consider the especial pro- 
vince of the instinctive life with regard to the spiritual. 
Though the former may exist without the latter, as happens 
with brutes, it is impossible for the spiritual life to exist 
without the instinctive. What sustains us and preserves us 
as animals (which we must needs be if we are to be men'), is 
essentially Instinct — not reason. The latter is the source 
of all our highest enjoyments, as human beings ; it is the 
instrument also of our progression, but it is by instinct that 
we are rendered capable of becoming human beings. " The 
basis of humanity is animalism. Man lives before he thinks ; 
he eats before he reasons ; he is social before he is civilized ; 
loves even against reason, and becomes a Nimrod long be- 
fore he is a Nestor." As the ground on which his spiritual 
nature is based, the instmctive faculties of man are made 
capable of a corresponding and adequate expansiveness. 



HIGHER PRINCIPLES ENNOBLE THE LOWER. 529 

Throughout the universe it is a law that higher principles 
shall descend into the next inferior, infusing into them a 
dignity and excellence which is neither native to them, nor 
attainable, except by communication from above ; God gives 
first efiect to it by imparting his glory to his nearest image, ■ 
"crowning" him with his divine "majesty and honor;" — 
all things in their turn pour a largess of their nobler nature 
on those beneath. Reason, under this great law, impreg- 
nates and ennobles instinct; the instinctive life similarly 
descends into the inanimate world, so far as the latter is 
competent to receive it. " Of the qualities," says Philo, 
" which the soul has received from God, it gives a share to 
the irrational portion of our nature, so that the mind is vi- 
vified by God, and the irrational part by the mind." The 
spiritual life can only expand by having a plane beneath it 
on which to rest ; this plane is furnished by the instinctive 
life, every enlargement of which in power and empire offers 
so much new scope and opportunity to the soul. The lower 
animals have no spiritual life thus to grow and dilate in 
them ; their powers, therefore, instead of being expansive, are 
determinate. They work, but only within the confines of 
their little circles, and after a thousand years' employ, are 
still where they began. In man on the other hand, by vir- 
tue of the inflowing spiritual life, they are capable of indefi- 
nite extension, and grow and spread like watered trees. 
Every year sees some new application of them, and the 
fruits of their exercises fill the earth. Nothing so plainly 
distinguishes between man and brutes as the absolute no- 
thingness of effect in the work of the latter. Unless the 
coral-islands be esteemed an exception, of all the past la- 
bors of all the animals that ever existed, there is not a trace 
extant : we see only what is accomplished by the individuals 
contemporaneous with ourselves. 



45 



530 INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE. 

299. Instinct, being thus co-ordinate with Life, comprises 
not only " vitality," and the unconscious external acts ordi- 
narily intended by the term — it is the inmost principle also 
of a large part of Intelligence, namely, all such intelligence, 
whether susceptible of cultivation or otherwise, as is applied 
to the effectuation of physical good. It is a higher type of 
intelligence which seeks spiritual good. Intelligence, so far 
as it relates to material well-being, is not a distinct faculty ; 
it is referable to the instinctive life, equally in brutes and 
mankind. It is quite a mistake to suppose that instinct has 
nothing of intelligence connected with it — that it is uni- 
formly and necessarily blind. Often it may be so, and in 
brutes perhaps it is the rule, but there are no tribes of crea- 
tures in which intelligence is not largely and most evidently 
exhibited, over and above their unconscious skill. The 
books upon instinct undeniably establish this. " Many ani- 
mals," Spurzheim remarks, " modify their actions according 
to external circumstances ; they even select one among dif- 
ferent motives. A dog may be hungry, but with the oppor- 
tunity he will not eat, because he remembers the blows he 
has received for having done so under similar circum- 
stances."* All the best writers on instinct concur in this 
opinion. " One might as well call all the actions of man 
rational," says the author of the Natural History of Enthu- 
siasm, " as all of the inferior, instinctive." Sir Benjamin 
Brodie, in his interesting " Psychological Inquiries," ex- 
presses his conviction that " if we study the habits of ani- 
mals, we cannot doubt that there are many which, however 
much they are dependent on their instincts, j^rq/i^ also by 
experience, though in a less degree than man." Old brutes 



* Philosophical Principles of Phrenology, p. 3. 



MEMORY. 531 

are more cunning than young ones. An experienced fox 
differs materially from a novice in the chase ; he foresees 
many snares, and endeavors to avoid them. We must re- 
member, further, that brutes in all probability have much 
more intelligence than we can become aware of, from their 
want of words, from our own inattention, and from our ig- 
norance of the import of the symbols which they use in 
giving intimations to one another and to ourselves. In 
short, neither is intelligence to be attributed to man as his 
prerogative, nor is the brute to be defined as a being of in- 
variably unconscious impulse. It is important to observe, 
however, that the understanding of brutes is affected solely 
through external or sensational stimuli. Human intelli- 
gence having reference to physical things, may be excited 
either by these or by the interior intelligence of the soul : 
intelligent acts are performed by brutes, on the other hand, 
only when the external, sensational stimulus which first 
called them forth, again affects the creature, and in precisely 
the same manner. That is to say, while Reason, or the in- 
telligence of the spiritual life, may operate independently 
of external stimuli — after it has once been excited by 
them — and does not require the aid of the external senses ; 
the activity of the intelligence of brutes depends for its ex- 
citation always and wholly upon such stimuli. This is par- 
ticularly observable in acts where memory is concerned. 
Memory, in the true idea of it, is a faculty of the spiritual 
life, and can be exercised without any external or sensa- 
tional stimulus — we lie quietly on our pillows, and in the 
dead of night can reproduce what we choose. Brutes have 
no such power ; they remember only through the medium 
of an outward sense — the dog, for instance, largely through 
the sense of smell. It is true that dogs betoken memory 
in dreams, as long ago described in the verses of Lu- 



532 MEN ALONE REMEMBEE PRINCIPLES. 

cretius,* but as this is clearly a recollection of mere events, 
in no way involving memory of principles, there can be 
little doubt that it is susceptible of the same physiologi- 
cal explanation as bears upon their waking acts. Men 
alone remember principles ; brutes simply remember circum- 
stances. In the former, memory is a spiritual function, and 
involves a complication of ideas ; in the latter it belongs to 
the instinctive life, and refers but to a single impression. 
Other acts of memory in brutes which appear at first sight 
difficult to reconcile with the principle of external stimulus, 
such as the return of bees to the hive, and of migratory 
birds to their native countries, though problems to-day, are 
referable, without doubt, to the same origin as the dreams 
of the hounds. " Exceptions of this sort," it is well re- 
marked by Dr. Martyn Paine, " are but few, and if they be 
admitted to surpass our present knowledge, the probability 
will be allowed, through the weight of analogies, that even 
these problems will be seen to be related to the common 
physiological laws Avhich rule the instinctive principle in its 
ordinary operations, and more especially so as they refer, in 
common with the rest, to the wants of organic life."f It is 
precisely the same with those gitasi-intelligent acts which 
are induced in certain animals by training — the various 
tricks, for example, which the elephant and the monkey are 
taught to play. Unlike genuine intelligence, or the facul- 
ties of the spiritual life, the superinduced conditions of the 
instinctive are never awakened except under the stimuli 



* Venantumque canes in molli ssepe quiete 
Jactant crura tamen subito, &c. 

De Eerum Natura, iv. 988-1004. 
f A Discourse on the Soul and Instinct, physiologically distin- 
guished from Materialism : New York, 1849. A very valuable little 
Essay. 



"moral sense" in brutes. 533 

which originally promoted them, and then only in direct 
relation with those stimuli. So, too, with what some au- 
thors call the "moral sense" of animals. Man alone has a 
moral sense, justly so called, seeing that it can only exist 
where there is a spiritual organism competent to receive the 
knowledge of God. The dog, for instance, is sometimes said 
to act from conscience — that it " manifests a sense of wrong 
when it surprises the game in a manner opposed to its in- 
structions, or does any other analogous acts. But this ma- 
nifestation happens only under the influence of those physi- 
cal causes which lead the creature to act more habitually in 
a different manner. The sense of wrong does not originate 
from the act, or on account of the act, but is inspired by 
the presence of the creature's master, whom it associates 
with the suffering which it endured when its instinct was 
undergoing discipline."* In thus recognizing the intelli- 
gence of brutes, we may seem to be advancing the very doc- 
trine above repudiated, that "instinct" is "less reason," and 
"reason" "more instinct." Not so. The term Reason, as 
commonly used, includes intelligence both as to physical 
ends and as to spiritual ones. With the former kind, in- 
stinct undoubtedly is identical, passing into it by degrees of 
Continuity; but from the latter it is separated by a Discrete 
degree, and is therefore absolutely distinct. 

800. It is easy to see that much of what is popularly 
called "Reason" was in its first exercise purely instinct. 
Long experience has thrown the early history of human 
usages so remotely to the rear, and we are naturally so 
prone to ascribe everything that is wise and good to " Rea- 
son," — as though we were too proud or too selfish to allow 



* A Discourse on the Soul and Instinct, physiologically distin- 
guished from Materialism : New York, 1849, p. 112. 
45® 



534 INSTINCT SUPERSEDED BY REASON. 

that the inferior animals have anything in common with 
us, — that Instinct not only goes without its fair share of 
credit, in our estimate of human nature, but is well-nigh 
ignored. In the infancy of our race, thousands of the acts 
which we now ascribe to Reason, must unquestionably have 
been impulses of instinct; destitute of the experience which 
now guides us, the first members of mankind must have 
proceeded, in innumerable cases, as the brutes do still; as 
experience accumulated, the instinctive procedures would 
gradually be superseded by thoughtful ones, and eventually 
they would come to be regarded as purely rational. The 
selection of food, for instance, must originally have been de- 
termined by an instinct in no respect different from that 
which leads the living brute to eat what is good for it, and 
to reject the unwholesome and the poisonous. Now, men 
may exercise their reason on the choice of new edibles ; they 
have plenty of experience to proceed upon ; but if instinct 
had not directed them at the first, Avhile deliberating what 
to eat, they would have starved. All arts and sciences may 
be referred back to simple instincts of the same character ; 
— instincts having physical welfare for their End, and excited 
by sensational stimuli ; their expansion and enrichment, as 
time has rolled along, they owe to the descending of the 
spiritual life on to the plane where they begin. Brutes 
have neither art nor science, because although they have 
instincts, they have no spiritual life to fertilize them. 
This latter is the reason also why the instincts of brutes 
are made to work with such admirable precision from the 
very moment of birth. As they have nothing further to 
receive, they are made perfect at the outset. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

S UMMAM T.—INSFIItA TION, 

301. If there be any coherence and validity in the rea- 
sonings contained in the foregoing pages, the conclusion 
must needs be that everything of which human intelligence 
is cognizant, whether animate or inanimate, material or 
spiritual, depends on the personal support of the Creator, 
and that Life is One and Omnipresent ; in other words, that 
God is the supra-natural ground of all phenomena, whether 
physical, physiological, or intellectual; and that all begin- 
nings and endings are displays of his divine life in opera- 
tion;— life which flowing continuously into his creation, 
never beginS or ends, but always is. "Natural laws" there 
are, plentiful and amazing, through which his Divine wills 
are effectuated, but God is the great mover and upholder 
of those laws ; there are no laws independently of Him, and 
all things are sustained by law. He who said " I bring a 
cloud over the earth," teaches us thereby that he is the direct 
and personal agent in all natural phenomena, however slight 
and apparently casual they may be, no less than in all 
spiritual phenomena. " Even the blind heathen named their 
supreme deity 'cloud-driving Jupiter;' and shall not we, thus 
taught by God himself, still more explicitly and reverently 
own the living Jehovah, the God in whom we live, and move 
and have our being, as the Creator of every cloud that flings 
its shadow over earth? We own him in the uproar of the 
tempest; let us own him in the stillness of the calm. We 

535 



536 ALL KNOWLEDGE DERIVED. 

own him in the huge billow; let us own him in the ripple 
that sinks quietly to rest upon the strand. We own him in 
the whirlwind ; let us own him in the placid breeze of even- 
ing." It is no trifling source of mere pleasure thus to recog- 
nize the Creator in the ordinary occurrences of the world. 
It sweetens every moment of our time; unites us delight- 
fully to the beauties of nature; and associates us with its 
varied objects as with so many friends and companions. 

302. Viewed in this way, the whole earth is a scene of 
Inspiration, — ^inspiration of sustaining and directing force, 
as regards its objects and physical phenomena, and of the 
power of thought and feeling as regards the soul. Life and 
Inspiration, in fact, go together. Inspiration is literally 
"breathing into;" Life is that which is inbreathed. Man 
could neither think nor feel were he not a subject of inspira- 
tion ; he does nothing purely of himself except choose. It is 
permitted him to elect by his free-will what things he will 
love and seek to possess, but all the vitality which he brings 
to bear upon the acquisition of those things, all the efforts 
which he makes in connection with the objectT of his love, 
have their well-spring and maintenance in God, — ttt^YT] 
Tzrjycov, "the fountain of fountains." Every vessel that is 
presented to him, God fills with his sustaining life, leaving 
the recipient to deal with it how he will; whether it be a 
pure vessel, or a foul, Life is poured into it all the same ; 
the quality is preserved or marred according to the condi- 
tion of the receptacle. We talk of our acquiring know- 
ledge of what surrounds us by virtue of our intellect. True. 
We do so, nevertheless, only in so far as God first inspires 
our intellect. We know nothing of a single object of crea- 
tion in a manner absolutely original. As finite things in 
their very nature are derived, our knowledge, as finite 
beings, must also be derivative. As the light of the sun 
makes nature, which in its absence is daxk, physically visible; 



INSPIRATION, 5o7 

SO the light of heaven makes it intellectually visible, and 
without that light we could know nothing about it. Man's 
physical eye does not see by virtue of any inherent property, 
but by the aid of the sunbeam ; so the intellectual eye does 
not perceive by virtue of innate power to perceive, but 
through that light which "has come into the world." We 
know, in short, just so much of things as God inspires us to 
know ; — a slender and fragmentary knowledge at the best, — 
even in its highest degree, mere opinion, since the real nature 
of things can only be known by the Infinite. Still, it is 
enough of them that we know, being just what is needful 
to our happiness, — the design of the Almighty in all that he 
confers. 

303. Inspiration, accordingly, in its full and essential 
sense, comprises every form and every variety of influx 
with which the Creator animates and instructs mankind. 
To attribute it simply to the "holy men of God" who 
" spake as they were moved by the holy ghost," is a mistake. 
In the inspiration of Moses, the Prophets, the Psalmists, 
and the Evangelists, Divine illumination is shown in its 
highest and immediate degree, not in its only one. There 
are as many degrees below it as there are grades of physical 
structure beneath the consummate frame of man. God is 
continually visiting the souls of all human beings with a 
certain amount of inspiration ; awarding to every individual 
the kind and quality suited to his capacity and appointed 
sphere of duty, and replenishing him with new supplies, 
according to his needs. St. Paul particularizes some of 
these " diversities of operations." To one is given the word 
of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge, to another 
prophecy, to another, divers kind of tongues, to another the 
interpretation of tongues. Influx or inspiration from God, 
however, is always in proportion to the out-pouring from 
ourselves of what he entrusts us with. New inspiration can 

X « 



538 OUR BEST THOUGHTS FROM GOD. 

only enter us through our communicating to our fellow-men 
the good, things we have previously received. We must bless 
them with whatever affection and intellect can bestow, if we 
would ourselves be newly blessed by God. This is what he 
intended us to learn from the incident of the widow's cruse 
of oil, which was replenished in the degree that the contents 
were poured away. Lynch puts the matter clearly and con- 
cisely. "The thinking man," he observes, "as another good 
result of his thoughtfulness, will get to feel how truly and 
impressively best thoughts and inward visions are gifts of 
God. When our ' views,' as we significantly say, are most 
earnest, most solemn, or most beautiful, we are often con- 
scious of being in a state rather than of making an effort."* 
Goethe held similar opinions, as related in his conversations 
with Eckermann; — "No productiveness of the highest kind, 
no remarkable discovery, no great thought which bears fruit 
and has results, is in the power of any one. Such things are 
elevated above all earthly control; man must consider them 
as unexpected gifts from above, as pure children of God, 
which he must receive and venerate with joyful thanks." 
All men who closely watch their inner life become conscious 
of these high truths, — at least as that life developes. The 
sign of growth of the soul is that it gradually loses confi- 
dence in its volitional reasonings about best and highest 
things, and reposes trust rather in what it feels to be given. 
Though it is our duty to think and work with all our might, 
we lose nothing by " tarrying the Lord's leisure." "Newton 
confessed that to his patience he owed everything. An 
apple plucked from the tree was the death and ruin of 
our race ; an apple falling from the tree told the story of the 
stars." 

304. It is from the perception of this universal and con- 



* Memorials of Tlieophilus Trinal, p. 14. 



POETICAL INSPIRATION". 539 

stant influx from heaven, that we speak in daily converse 
of being inspired with hope, inspired with courage, inspired 
with veneration; also of the inspiration of the musician, 
the inspiration of the poet. For in using such phrases 
of course we recognize an inspirer, or we mean nothing. 
All come from the same source, and a single principle ex- 
plains every variety. The relation between the inspiration 
of the Poet, justly so called, and that of the Bible, is pe- 
culiarly important. Before we can properly understand 
what biblical inspiration is, it has been well said, we must 
understand what poetical inspiration is. The two things are 
more closely allied than many suppose. No intelligent 
reader of Scripture needs to be reminded that the resem- 
blance of their written results is most intimate and profound ; 
the poetic interpretation of nature stands, in fact, on a level 
with the interpretation of the symbolic language of Holy 
Writ. Philology goes no deeper than the surface ; the inner 
arcana belong to Poetry, and it is only poetical minds of the 
highest order that can bring them forth in their true colors. 
The poetry of the Bible is one of the features that especially 
stamp its divine origin ; it discloses the composition of the 
Mind that uttered it ; and deserves as keen attention as its 
simple doctrines. If that God were only Intellect, — if there 
were only a head shown in nature and the Bible, then the 
scientific and philological interpretation would compass all. 
But he is Love also. Therefore the world and his word are 
no less full of heart, so that there is endless poetic interpre- 
tation needed likewise. Poetry was rightly accounted in old 
times the language of the gods. To view nature in a poetical, 
is an approach towards viewing it in a religious, light. The 
ancients expressed themselves in terms similar to our own, 
with regard to inspiration. Homer describes his heroes as 
" inspired with valor" by their guardian deities ; and in nar- 
rating the famous story of Penelope and her web, piously 



540 POLYTHEISM. 

makes her say that her ingenious schemes were " breathed 
into her by a god." (Odyssey xix. 138.) He has a passage 
also to precisely the same purpose as St. Paul's, saying that 
to one God gives dancing, to another music, to another a 
prudent mind, to another valor, &c. (Iliad xiii, 727 — 733.) 
In the 8th Odyssey he repeats it in a varied and more ele- 
gant form, — " One man is weaker, but God adorns him with 
words, and he discourses with mild modesty ; another in his 
form is like the immortals, but grace is not set as a crown 
around his speech." (170 — 177.) Seneca comments upon 
inspiration in singularly eloquent terms. " Without God," 
he observes, " there is no great man. It is He who inspires 
us with great ideas and exalted designs. When you see a 
man superior to his passions, happy in adversity, calm amid 
surrounding storms, can you forbear to confess that these 
qualities are too exalted to have their origin in the little in- 
dividual whom they ornament? A god inhabits every 
virtuous man, and without God there is no virtue." (Epis- 
tles, 41, 73.) The "paganism" and "polytheism" of such 
men deserves a milder judgment than is often passed upon 
it. However vicious and defective in some respects, it rested 
on a pure and reverent religious feeling, which needed but 
Christianity to give it a right direction. That which distin- 
guishes Christianity from the moralism of Seneca, is not so 
much an absolute difference in the principles inculcated, as 
the power which it brings, by virtue of its immediate origin, 
to carry them out practically in the life. Polytheism, in- 
deed, regarded in its better aspect, was but the designation 
under many names, of the one universal Father, just as in 
Scripture the single Jehovah is styled the Mighty One, the 
Lion, the Shepherd, and by hundreds of other names in 
turn. The more philosophical of the ancients were fully 
alive to the fact of such being the veritable intent of their 
theological doctrines. "It is of very little consequence," 



LIFE IMPARTED, NOT CREATED. 641 

says the author just quoted, " by what name you call the 
first Nature, the Divine Reason that presides over the uni- 
verse, and fills all the parts of it. He is still the same God. 
We Stoics sometimes call him Father Bacchus, because he 
is the universal life that animates nature ; sometimes Mer- 
cury, because he is the Eternal Reason, Order, and Wisdom. 
You may give him as many names as you please, provided 
you allow but one sole principle universally present." (^De 
Beneficiis, Lib. iv. cap. 7-8.) St. Augustin, probably with 
these passages, and similar ones in the Philosophical Dis- 
sertations of Maximus Tyrius, (xxix., &c.) before his 
mind, puts the matter in the same generous light. " It 
was one God," he observes, "the universal Creator and 
Sustainer, who in the ethereal spaces was called Jupiter, 
in the sea Neptune, in the sun Phoebus, in the fire 
Vulcan, in the vintage Bacchus, in the harvests Ceres, in 
the forests Diana, in the sciences Minerva." (De Civ. 
Dei. iv. 2.) 

305. Briefly, then, and finally, we must never attempt to 
think of Life, in any of its manifestations, apart from, or 
independently of God. Life is uncreate, and wherever Life 
is, He is. The same grand principles which we find at the 
summit of creation, or in the intelligence of man, and which 
we acknowledge, unhesitatingly, to be by influx of the divine 
life, are embodied in every kingdom below man, in another 
and humbler manner ; animals, plants, and minerals seve- 
rally and in turn presenting them, after the likeness of de- 
scending octaves. What are Intelligence and Emotion in 
the soul, reappear, as we descend, in the shape of Instinct, 
Vitality, and the physical properties of inanimate matter; 
the higher the End, and thence the Form, the more noble is 
the presentation ; as the dignity of the End diminishes, and 
along with it the grandeur of the form, so does the intensity 
of the life. With every step in descent, there is a decline in 

46 



542 LIFE EPITOMIZED IN GENIUS. 

power ; some energy ceases, some faculty disappears, yet the 
essential principle runs the entire length, and is found at 
the end as perfect as at the beginning. It is by no means 
the same manifestation that we find. Each new manifesta- 
tion is lower than the next above by a discrete degree; 
hence while there are innumerable analogies between them, 
little pertains absolutely in common, save their x>ne, divine 
origination. The hardest to connect together are doubtless 
the life of the mineral and the life of the soul. It must be 
done by the intermediate degrees. When we reflect how 
beautifiilly the organizing life of the body repeats, on its 
lower plane, the organizing life of the soul, it is not difficult 
to see that the operation of the crystalizing force in mine- 
rals is analogous to that of the vital force in plants and ani- 
mals, — that crystalization, in fact, is mineral organization. 
Both in organic and in inorganic bodies, the atoms are 
drawn together and disposed with unerring precision, and 
with the most exquisite symmetry. The lower physical 
forces prepare the way. By attraction, matter is simply 
collected together, — one atom held to another, even of the 
most heterogeneous kind; Chemical Affinity superadds to 
attraction, the choice of particular atoms, which combine 
moreover, in definite proportions ; Crystalization brings the 
atoms thus held together into fixed geometrical solids, 
moulding them, as it were, with the finger of vitality. The 
correspondence of the life of the soul with that of the body 
appears most plainly perhaps in what is called Genius. 
That admirable and wondrous faculty which on the lowest 
plane constructs crystals, turning the opaque and grimy 
charcoal into chaste and lucid diamond ; — which on the 
higher plane constructs blood, and sap, and tissues, builds 
them into organs, and then impels them to achieve beautiful 
and useful works ; — that same faculty reappears on the 
highest or spiritual plane, as constructive, formative Intel- 



ESSENTIAL CHAKACTERISTIC OF LIFE. 543 

lectual force, enabling its possessor, with the help of memory 
as a handmaid, to become the poet, the sculptor, or the 
painter. The essential characteristic of Life is its construc- 
tive, organizing force, and this is precisely what character- 
izes Genius. 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 



PART I, 



While to the poet and the thoughtful man the changes 
of Times and Seasons are in the highest degree beautiful 
and suggestive, even to the most indifferent and selfish they 
are surrounded with an agreeable interest. None view 
their progress without regard, however little they may be 
attracted by their sweet pictures and phenomena, or moved 
by the amenities and wisdom of their ministry. This is be- 
cause the changes incidental to nature are, on the one hand, 
a kind of counterpart or image of the occurrences and vicis- 
situdes of human life ; and on the other, the circumstances 
by which its business and pleasures are in large measure 
suggested and controlled. The consummation of the old 
year, and the opening of the new, brings with it, accord- 
ingly, a fine significance, and a pleasurable importance. 
So, in their degree, the transitions of Winter into Spring, 
of Spring into Summer, of Summer into Autumn ; and so, 
in their degree, the alternations of day and night. The 
longer the interval, the more interesting is the change. 

The close of the year occupies the foremost place in this 
universal interest, from its completing a well-defined and 
comprehensive cycle of natural mutations. It is by this 
circumstance rendered an appropriate epoch for the mea- 
surement of life and being ; and hence there fasten on it 
peculiar momentousness and solemnity, which remain inse- 

46 « 645 



546 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

parably attached though the season be unknown or forgot- 
ten. Days and nights follow too rapidly to serve such a 
purpose; and the endings of months and seasons are insuffi- 
ciently distinct, except as regards Autumn, which in its ma- 
turity and fruits fulfills the very cycle in question. Only as 
the result of these mutations does the year exist. Were 
there no primroses to die with the spring, no lilies to vanish 
with the summer; were there not sequences of leaf and 
flower, sunshine and starlight, there would even be no Time. 
For Time, like Space, pertains but to the material circum- 
ference of creation, that is to the visible half of the universe, 
and is only appreciable through its medium. It is by ob- 
jective nature alone that the ideas both of Time and Space 
are furnished, and they are sustained in us only so long as 
we are in contact with it. The movements of the heavenly 
bodies contribute the most exact and obvious data, because 
expressly given " for signs, and for seasons, and for days, 
and for years."* But the heavens are not our only time- 
piece. Another is spread over the surface of the earth in 
its living products. The phenomena connected with plants 
and the habits of the lower animals, constitute in themselves 
a complete system of chronometry ; indicating not merely 
seasons, but even days and hours. In the times of the leaf- 
ing of trees, the blooming of flowers, the ripening of fruits, 
the appearance of insects, the singing and nest-building of 



* The fine poetic fancy of the ancients deified the various divi- 
sions of time, and placed them as attendants on the Sun, himself a 
god of the highest rank. See the beautiful description in Ovid's 
Metamorphoses, ii. 26-30, where they are represented as standing 
round his throne, and wearing the insignia proper to their offices 
in the economy of nature. Hence come the innumerable alliisions 
in poetry to " the Hours," as goddesses : — 

" The Graces, and the rosy-bosomed Hours." — Milton. 



TIMES AND SEASONS, 547 

birds, the departure and return of the migratory kinds, 
and of every other such incident of unmolested nature, 
there is nothing chanceful or uncertain. Every event tran- 
spires at a fixed point in the series of changes it belongs 
to. So precise, in particular, are the hours at which differ- 
ent kinds of flowers open, that it is not only possible, but 
easy to form a " dial of Flora," by planting them in the or- 
der of their expansion. A very little botany will enable 
any one to notice, during the early part of the day, espe- 
cially before the dew is off the grass, how one flower antici- 
pates another. And not only as to opening in the morning, 
but as to closing in the afternoon and evening. Nothing is 
more pleasant to the lover of nature, than to watch their 
gradual retirement to rest, and the wonderful diversities of 
mode in which they shut their petals. The curious coinci- 
dences between many of these phenomena, (as of certain 
birds returning from their winter quarters at the identical 
times when certain flowers come into bloom) have an espe- 
cial interest, seeing that they not only indicate times, but 
supply striking illustrations of the lovely sympathies of na- 
ture, for in nature there is nothing without a friend. Celes- 
tial and atmospheric phenomena, if they have fewer of the 
charms of variety, in their splendors compensate it tenfold. 
How beautiful to note the phases of the moon, the chame- 
leon tintings of the sky, the traveling of the planets, and 
the circling round the pole of the seven bright stars of the 
sleepless Bear ! With what gladness and enthusiasm, too, 
in the cold, inanimate winter, we view the rising of Orion, 
and his brilliant quarter of the heavens. The cheerlessness 
of the earth is forgotten in the magnificence overhead, and 
we thank God for unfolding so much glory. Every event, 
moreover, having its own poetical relations, at once refreshes 
the heart, and places before the mind some elegant item in 
the innumerable harmonies of the universe. In the perpe- 



548 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

tual sparkle of the Bear is presented an image of the ever- 
wakeful eyes of Providence; and in the alternate waxing 
and waning of the moon, a beautiful picture of the oscilla- 
tions in man's fortunes. Hence we find Plutarch using the 
latter to describe the chequered life of Demetrius ; and 
Dante, to pourtray the varying fortunes of Florence : — 

E come '1 volger del ciel della luna 
Cuopre ed iscuopre i liti senza posa, 
Cosi fa di Fiorenza la Fortura. 

(Paradiso, xvi., 82-84.) 

(As the revolution of the moon's heavenly sphere hides and reveals 
the strand unceasingly, so fortune deals with Florence.) 

The regularity with which the phenomena of nature recur, 
and their determinate and unvarying character, are ex- 
pressed even in many names. Spring is literally the season 
of growth; summer that of sunshine; autumn (from augeo) 
that of increase or fertility; winter that of the "windy 
storm and tempest." All languages possess equivalent 
terms. "Zif," the name of the second Hebrew month, or 
from thenew moon of May to that of June, signifies literally, 
"the sj)lendor of flowers." "Choreph," the name for au- 
tumn, in the same language, means "the gathering season," 
or time of harvest and fruits. The names given to the 
months by the French Revolutionists of 1789, every one 
will remember as in deference to the same instinctive prin- 
ciple. 

Times, years, seasons, accordingly, are not to be esteemed 
a part of creation, but simply an accident or result of it. 
Our personal experiences concur with nature in testifying 
this, for to no two men has time the same duration, nor does 
any individual reckon it always by the same dial. To the 
slothful, time has the feet of a snail; to the diligent, the 
wings of an eagle. Impatience lengthens, enjoyment 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 549 

shortens it. The unhappy and desolate see nothing but 
weary tedium; with the cheerful it glides like a stream. 
"The time," says the unhappy poet, in his wretched exile, 
"goes so slowly, you would think it was standing still. The 
summer does not shorten my nights, nor the winter my days. 
Do the usual periods really perform their wonted courses? 
Everything is protracted with my eyes."* How different 
when we are satisfied and glad! Let us go amid new and 
delightful sceneries, such as vividly excite and animate us, 
and when over, the days seem to have been hours, the weeks 
to have been days. Let us retire into the quiet, secluded 
sanctuaries of thought, losing ourselves in memory or hope, 
and how complete again is the departure of all conception 
of either time or space. As in Dreamland, distance col- 
lapses, and years and life-times contract into a few shining 
moments. So, too, when pursuing occupations under the 
influence of deep feeling, — "Jacob served seven years for 
Rachel, yet they seemed to him but a few days, for the love 
he had to her." In Milton, Eve beautifully says to 
Adam, — 

With thee conversing, I forget all time; 

All seasons, and their change, all please alike. 

Time, therefore, as in reference to material existence it 
simply denotes change, in reference to the spiritual or inner 
life, is but another name for emotional states or attitudes. 
The man who not only feels to, but actually does live longest, 
in other words, sees most time, is he who, taking God for a 
sweet, guiding, and enveloping thought, and quick to read 
Nature, receives from it the greatest number of impress- 
sions. 

Natural mutations are emblems both of the external or 



* Ovid. Tristia, Book v., Elegy x. 



550 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

corporeal life, and of the inner or spiritual life. And this 
is equally the case whether the history of a year or of a day 
be taken. For nature, though she seems endlessly diversi- 
fied, proceeds on but few methods, of which her diversities 
are varied expressions. Whatever department we may se- 
lect, whether organization, music, or language, the pheno- 
mena of life or those of insensible matter, one or two lead- 
ing ideas are all that can be discriminated. Not that the 
talent of nature, though great for species, is poor for genera, 
because nature, as a manifestation of the Infinite, is com- 
petent, necessarily, to express his infinite attributes. It is 
that with a view to presenting a sublime and intelligible 
unity, such as man's mind shall apprehend with profit and 
delight, she better loves to repeat, over and over again, a 
few fixed and elegant designs, than to amaze and confound 
with an endless multiplicity. When, therefore, from the 
outward expression, we penetrate towards the interior idea 
it is always to find some old, familiar fashion ; and to learn 
that shapes and complexions are but liveries or costumes 
appropriate to their several occasions. The history and 
lapse of a day agree, accordingly, with the history of a year, 
of which the day is a miniature. Winter corresponds with 
night, summer with noon, spring with morning, whence the 
beautiful phrase in 1 Sam. ix. 26, "the spring of the day," 
and in Lucretius, the equivalent fades verna diei (i. 10.) 
The history of a life-time conforms in turn with both the year 
and the day, as shown in our speaking of life's morning, 
noon, and evening; of its spring, summer, autumn, and 
winter; its April, its May, and its December. For all or- 
ganized beings are but successions of phenomena, commenc- 
ing, like the year, in darkness and apparent passivity, and 
ending in surrender to the effacing fingers of decay. " Even- 
ing," says Aristotle, "has the same relation to day that old 
age has to life. Therefore evening may be called the old 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 551 

age of tBe day, aud old age the evening of life, or, as it is 
styled by Empedocles, 'the setting of life.' " Nothing has 
more pleased the poets than to descant on the similitudes so 
strikingly displayed, especially on behalf of the four seasons. 
Ovid, for instance, in that extraordinary catalogue of muta- 
tions, the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses; Young, in 
the sixth book of the ]S"ight Thoughts ; and Thomson, at the 
conclusion of his " Winter :" — 

Behold, fond man ! 
See here thy pictured life ! Pass some few years. 
Thy flowering Spring, thy Summer's ardent strength, 
Thy sober Autumn, fading into age, 
And pale concluding Winter comes at last. 
And shuts the scene. 

Prose literature likewise afibrds numerous allusions to these 
analogies. They are a constant subject also with sculptors 
and painters, whose highest function is faithfully to repro- 
duce in objective forms what the poetic faculty seeks else- 
where to delineate in words. The famous riddle of the 
Sphynx, the solution of which by CEdipus cost her her life, 
will occur to the recollection of every one — " What animal 
is that which in the morning goes upon four legs, at mid-day 
upon two, in the evening upon three?" On the identifica- 
tion of youth with Spring was no doubt founded the ancient 
belief that it was in the Spring that the world was created : 
a notion supported, among the moderns, by Stukeley, in his 
chapter called "Cosmogonia, or the World's Birth-day." 
{PalceograpMa Sacra, p. 44.) It needs no very deep science 
to perceive that if the world were created in any season, it 
must have been created in all four, since it is always Spring 
someivhere, always Summer, Autumn, and Winter, in one 
part of the globe or another. If it be intended merely to 
assert that it was Spring in the latitude where our first 
parents began their lives, then, perhaps, the fancy may be 



552 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

allowed. According to Venerable Bede, the question was 
first determined at a council held at Jerusalem, about the 
year 200. After a learned discussion, reported verbatim, it 
is finally decided that the world's birth-day was Sunday, 
April 8th, or at the vernal equinox, and at the full of the 
moon! (Ojiera, tom. 2, pp. 346, 347. Ed. Basil, 1563.) 

Dwelling as we do, in the heart of the material and fugi- 
tive, it is perfectly natural that winter and night should be 
regarded as representative of the last stage of our existence. 
Yet their truest agreement is not with decay. It is rather 
with the darkness and passivity which pr eliminate life, and 
out of which life springs. Everywhere in creation the dim 
and shapeless is prior in point of time. The universal law 
is that the passive shall precede the active, ignorance know- 
ledge, indifierence love. This is why the narrative of the 
creation opens with saying that the earth was without form 
and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep ; and why 
among the ancients. Night was finely styled "mother of all 
things." 

With him enthroned, 
Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things. 

The cosmogony of the Greeks, as given by Hesiod, and of 
every ancient nation of which any records survive, opens 
with darkness, out of whose womb presently proceeds light. 
Such is the order acknowledged, indeed, by all the greatest 
poets who have ornamented the world. What a fine line is 
that in Mephistopheles' address to Faust, when he first 
introduced himself, — 

Ein Theil der Finstermiss die sich das Licht gebar. 
(Part of the darkness which brought forth Light !) 

If we would observe a philosophic order, winter, therefore, 
should stand first, not last, in the scheme of the seasons, as 



TIMES AND SEASONS 553 

among tlie ancient Egyptians, with whom harmonies were an 
exact science, and who drew the sun at the winter solstice as 
an infant, at the vernal equinox as a youth, at the summer 
solstice as a man of middle age, and at the autumnal equi- 
nox as one in his maturity.* The other seasons would then 
fall into their rightful places, Autumn, or the period of ripe- 
ness, crowning the noble annals. For autumn, in turn, it is 
far less just to regard as emblematic of bodily decrepitude, 
than of consummation, maturity and riches. Job gives a 
beautiful example of its legitimate symbolic use when, 
recalling the days of his prosperity, he denominates them 
his ^in (choreph,) literally, as above mentioned, his time of 
gathering in fruits. The authorized version neutralizes this 
eloquent figure by translating it " in the days of my youth." 
But that the word here certainly signifies Autumn, is plain 
from the remainder of the chapter, even without consulting 
its etymology. Pindar uses Autumn for the perfection of 
physical beauty. (Isth. 2, 5. Nem. 5, 6.) Sir Thomas 
Browne applies the same name to the Resurrection. The 
dating of the year from a day in the depth of winter is 
itself a testimony to the true position of the seasons in 
question. 

By virtue of the primitive relations which so wonderfully 
link the spiritual and the material, the growth of the year 
has precisely the same analogies with the development of 
the intellect and afiections, as with the history of the body. 
Winter answers to their germ-stage, summer to their flow- 
ers, autumn to their maturity. Hence the elegant and fa- 
miliar metaphors by which the first buddings of the intellect 
and affections are called their Spring. The Greek poets not 
infrequently put Autumn, in like manner, for ripened intel- 



^ Macrobius, Saturnalia, Lib. 1, cap. 21. 
47 Y 



554 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

ligence and wisdom, as ^schylus, in his tragedy of the 
Suppliants.* Gifted with the sight of these fine analogies, 
few things are more delightful to the accomplished mind 
than to note the early primrose and anemone, the wood-sor- 
rel, and the young, uncurling ferns. It sees in them, and 
in all delicate buds, the pictorial counterparts of its own 
first steps — images of the pretty little flowers of fancy and 
afiection put forth from the heart of a child. The same cir- 
cumstances originate an important part of the pleasure with 
which the mind regards the verdure of trees newly-leafed, 
the activities and the music of birds, and the thousand other 
fair conditions of the year in its adolescence. It sees re- 
flected in them its own felt progress. In that perfect sea 
of rich poetry, " Festus," both the physical and the spiritual 
symbolism of the year are given in a single passage : — 

We women have four seasons, like the year. 

Our spring is in our lightsome, girlish days. 

When the heart laughs within us for sheer joy. 

Summer is when we love and are beloved ; 

Autumn when some young thing with tiny hands. 

And rosy cheeks, and flossy, tendrilled locks, 

Is wantoning about us day and night. 

And Winter is when those we loved have perished, 

For the heart ices then. 

Some miss one season, some another ; this 

Shall have them early ; and that, late. 

The soul, as it quickens towards God (which is quite a 
difierent thing from growth in the loves and intellectualities 
of the simply secular life), similarly views itself reflected 
wherever the vernal is gushing forth, and loves to think 
how profound is the dependence on Him " Avho changeth 
the times and the seasons, who giveth wisdom to the wise, 

* 998, 1015. 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 555 

and revealeth the deep and secret things." A more com- 
plete and admirable image than is here presented, it would 
be difficult to find. For like the seeds and roots which lie 
hidden in the cold, bare earth during winter, full of splen- 
did capacity and life, are the latent desires in the una- 
wakened soul for what is good and heavenly, inherited from 
the golden age ; and when once quickened, nothing can re- 
press their energy, or forbid their shooting into a luxuriant 
and flowery vesture for the surface late so naked. We 
should never desire to be regenerated were it not for the re- 
mains of original innocence, which thus repose, like sleeping 
angels, in our hearts. Martineau appropriately opens his 
beautiful book, " Endeavors after the Christian Life," with 
sketching this truest spring-time of the soul, this beginning 
of its real, productive life. " The thoughts which constitute 
religion are too vast and solemn to remain subordinate. 
They are germs of a growth which, with true nurture, must 
burst into independent life, and overspread the whole soul. 
When the mind, beginning to be busy for itself, ponders the 
ideas of the infinite and eternal, it detects, as if by sudden 
inspiration, the immensity of the relations which it bears to 
God and immortality. The old formulas of religious in- 
struction break their husk, and give forth the seeds of won- 
der and of love. Everything that before seemed great and 
worthy is dwarfed ; and secular affinities sink into nothing- 
ness compared with the heavenly world which has been dis- 
covered. There is a period when earnest spirits become 
thus possessed ; disposed to contrast the grandeur of their 
new ideal with the littleness of all that is actual, and to look 
with a sublimated feeling, which in harsher natures passes 
into contempt, on pursuits and relations once sufficient for 
the heart's reverence." " Pray that your flight be not in 
the winter" means " before the frosts of indifierence to God 
have melted." 



556 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

The sequence of morning to night pourtrays precisely the 
same facts, because each perfect and independent day of 
twenty-four hours is a year in little, and therefore the ana- 
logue of the entire spiritual history. We speak, accord- 
ingly, of the night of ignorance, the night of superstition, 
the dawn of reason, the dawn of the understanding. Hence, 
too, the innumerable beautiful figures in which these things 
are spoken of under the equivalent names of " darkness " 
and " light." As with the transition from ignorance into 
knowledge, so with the nobler progress which introduces us 
to God. Before we know him, it is night, afterwards it is 
morning and day. It is in the night that he comes to us, 
just as it is during the night of nature that the sun ap- 
proaches (for it is not morning till he is risen), whence the 
beautiful figure in the parable, that the cry of the bride- 
groom's coming is heard at " midnight." It was for tht 
same reason that the angels announced the nativity to the 
shepherds by night rather than by day — a ministry sweetly 
renewed, with all its heavenly light and music, wherever 
the "flocks" of the heart are seen to be watched and 
cherished. 

To the same class of facts belong the circumstances of our 
Lord being born into the material world in the depth of 
winter ; and of the crucifixion taking place during chilly, 
wintry weather, as shown by the people kindling a fire and 
warming themselves. These are not mere accidents in the 
history, but representative occurrences inseparably con- 
nected with the spiritual ones they accompany. In several 
ancient languages the name of God is literally " light," or 
" morning." Such is the case with the Greek 6£0<; and the 
Latin Deus (whence the French Dieu, and our own word 
Deity, ^ both of which, together with the name of the old In- 
dian god Dyaus, rest on the Sanscrit root div, to shine or 
irradiate. The Greek Zzo(; and the Latin Jw-piter are from 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 557 

the same source, by permutation of sounds, as shown by the 
inflections J^/oCj Jovis, &c., and by the derivatives divum 
(v/hence divine and divinity) and dies, the day, literally "the 
shining." Jupiter, and the equivalent Diespater, Diespiter, 
signify, literally, "father of light." With the same root are 
doubtless connected the Celtic di, dian, and the Anglo-Saxon 
dcegan, whence our current dawn and day. 

But more than one such day is needful to regenerate a 
man. He must go through many successive stages, intro- 
duced to one day after another, through the medium of 
many nights of labor and struggle. And that we may be 
familiarized with it from the first, this is just what is 
depicted at the very entrance to God's Word. In their 
"evenings and mornings," and the accompanying serial 
creations, the opening verses of Genesis sublimely picture 
the development of the various emotions and perceptions 
proper to the Christian character, which gradually open 
out, like the days of a week. For there are no leaps in the 
history of spiritual progress, — no violent transitions. There 
can be no seventh day's rest in heaven without six preceding 
ones of work, which every man must perform for himself, at 
God's suggestion, and with God's help. "Let there be 
light" is only the introductory act, — the showing the way. 
At first man is not conscious how much is needed of him. 
It seems sufficient that light has broken. He knows not 
how bare and desolate is his heart, nor that, until a third, 
and a fourth, and a fifth day shall have clothed it with 
spiritual counterparts of the "living creatures," the "grass," 
the "herbs," and the "fruit-trees," it will be only a desert, 
and can neither "rejoice" nor "blossom as the rose." Of 
such a course of developments, accordingly, growth in religion 
is made up, each stage having its own evening and morning, 
just as each year of life has its winter and summer. For 
"evening" here signifies, not the twilight of a day that is 

47 » 



558 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

past, but the whole of the dark portion of the twenty-four 
hours, and "morning" the whole of the light portion. The 
two together make up a complete period in the history, just 
as a night and a day combined, (the latter dating from 
midnight^ make up each of the three hundred and sixty-five 
"days" of the solar year. 

The creation of man comes last, because it is not until 
such a series of developments has taken place, that the 
intellect and afiections attain that upright and noble attitude 
in reference to God, which constitutes genuine manliness. 



PART II. 

Times and seasons correspond with the life of man in a 
twofold manner. First, there is the image of his gradual 
development, both as to body and soul, presented, as above 
described, in each complete and independent year and day. 
Secondly, there is the image of his innumerable changes and 
vicissitudes, presented in the varied qualities and occurrences 
of seasons, days, and hours in general. For as with winter 
and summer, light and darkness, heat and cold, rain and 
sunshine, clouds and azure, music and silence, — for even the 
wind and the waters are still at times, — so with health and 
sickness, hunger and content, fatigue and vigor; no state or 
condition is lasting. Down even to the minute and secret 
phenomena of what the physiologists call "molecular death," 
namely, the continual decay and replacement of the animal 
tissues. Change is the universal condition of existence. And 
while so marked a feature of the inanimate world, and of 
the animal life, infinitely more true of the soul, because of 
its infinitely higher capabilities and senses. At one moment 
buoyant with hope, at another depressed by disappointment 
or misgivings ; cheerful to-day, mournful to-morrow ; in the 
course even of a few minutes it will run through a long series 
of intensest emotions. Change, accordingly, has in all ages 
been the chosen theme of the moralist and the preacher; 
while, as at once the most solemn yet most animating, the 
most sad yet most beautiful subject on which the human mind 
can dwell, poetry and philosophy have ever held a friendly 

559 



560 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

rivalry in describing its loveliness, and interpreting its les- 
sons.* Well styled by Feltliam, "the great lord of the uni- 
verse," all the best charms of objective nature, and all the 
noblest attitudes of the intellect and aifections owe their 
being to its magic touch. Incessantly at work, transfiguring, 
dissolving, and recombining, it makes the physical world one 
vast kaleidoscope wherein new and unthought-of charms 
are brought to view with every turn of day and season. 
Changed, not destroyed, our lament for the beautiful as it 
glides from out our grasp, is but to lament that brighter 
things are coming. For there is no truth more sublime than 
that decay, death, and disappearance are not annihilation, 
but simply the attendants on change of form. Annihilation is 
an impossible thing. Nor is there any truth more consola- 
tory. The chrysalis is the cradle of the butterfly at the 
same moment that it is the tomb of the grub ; the flowers of 
the summer cease to smile, that the fruits of autumn may 
step forth. So with the changes of the inner life. For as 
changes and contrasts are the springs of all our happiness 
and enjoyment in connection with the external life, as well 
as productive of the most charming aspects and conditions 
of nature ; so is it from changes in our spiritual states that 
we acquire true wisdom, and that our aflTections become in- 
vited into their loveliest and most sacred channels. No 
one, for instance, is capable of truly and heartily sympa- 
thizing with the troubles of another, until he has himself 
been touched by sorrow. How beautiful and pathetic, be- 
cause so faithful to nature, is that passage in the first -^Eneid 



* As beautiful for its succinctness, as the 15th book of the Meta- 
morphoses is remarkable for its detail, on the subject of change, is 
the fine passage in the (Edipus Coloneus, of Sophocles, beginning 
<L (piXrar' Aiykw; naX, (607-615.) With the former compare Lucretius, 
"Mutat enim, mundi naturam totius setas," &c. Lib. v. 826-834. 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 561 

where the gentle but unfortunate Dido speaks for the genu- 
ineness of her sympathy on the ground of her own experi- 
ence of misfortune. It is, indeed, by reason of this neces- 
sity, that the laws and phenomena of the natural world are 
as we find them. Throughout the universe, whatever ex- 
ists, exists not so much for its own sake, as for the sake of 
something higher and nobler than itself. Night does not 
unroll its shades solely that the body may rest and sleep ; 
nor does winter diffuse its frosts only that the trees and 
plants may hybernate, and the soul refit itself for feeding 
them. They have a nobler use than this. They have les- 
sons to give. They exist, like all other natural mutations, 
that they may be emblematic of the vicissitudes so import- 
ant to the spirit; and that from studying the glory and 
beauty which arise from them, we may learn what is the 
end and promise of our own. " We often live under a 
cloud," says a thoughtful writer, " and it is well for us that 
we should. Uninterrupted sunshine would parch our hearts : 
we want shade and rain to cool and refresh them." If this 
be true of the secular side of our constitution, how much 
more so of the heavenly ! It shows why Scripture history 
(which has a didactic intent throughout) is one continuous 
detail of misfortune and success, trouble and consolation ; — 
the narrative, for instance, of the pilgrimage of the Israel- 
ites, universally acknowledged to be typical of the way of 
regeneration. In this, every one is beset by hindrances and 
temptations, which, though sorely oppressive while they last, 
nevertheless give place in turn to triumph. The hunger 
and thirst, and bitter streams, all show what must be anti- 
cipated, but no less so the supply of food, and the sweeten- 
ing of the waters. It is a happy thing for a man to feel 
famished, and that the waters are bitter, for it is the sign 
of an amending nature, and leads him to cry to God for 
help. If we are not often so impelled, it is a proof that we 

Y« 



562 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

are but little advanced upon our journey. There can be no 
virtue or gladness without trial and suffering in the first 
place. There is no buying corn of Joseph till there has 
been a famine in the land ; nor can any man know what 
are the green pastures and the still rivers, till he has been 
in the valley of the shadow of death. God cannot lead him 
thither till he has felt how weak he is in himself. Until 
this experience shall have been gone through, they are a 
mere mirage of the imagination. " It must needs be that 
the Son of Man sufier before he enter into his glory." In 
its aptitude for grievances, temptations, and perplexities, 
conjoined with its free-will, the spirit of man is constituted, 
accordingly in the very best manner possible for urging him 
on towards heaven. Though they are painful to him, they 
are privileges.* That was a deep insight into the economy 
of Providence which saw that — 

Sweet are the uses of adversity. 

Had Flavins Boethius never been imprisoned by Theodoric, 
he had never written his " Consolations of Philosophy." To 
a prison also we owe the " Pilgrim's Progress." 

As with numbers of other splendid truths, we uncon- 
sciously express the excellency of alternation in various 
words of common discourse, as temper, temperament, tem- 
perature. For all these terms have an immediate aflfinity 
W'ith the Latin tempus, "time." Literally, therefore, to 
"temper," signifies to combine or intermingle difierent 



* In reference to these matters may be quoted Lord Bacon's ad- 
mirable precept that " we should practice all things at two several 
times, the one when the mind is best disposed, the other when it is 
worst disposed ; that by the one you may gain a great step ; by the 
other you may work out the knots and stonds of the mind." (Adv. 
of Learning, Book ii.) 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 563 

states or conditions, just as seasons, days and nights are in- 
termingled by nature. And as the object of such intermin- 
gling is to benefit and ameliorate, the idea of benevolence 
incorporates "with it. Thus, " God tempers the wind to the 
shorn lamb." Virgil often uses the word in this vfsey. 
When the sunburnt land is refreshed by water, he says that 
" arentia temperat arva," " it tempers the thirsty fields ;" and 
a little further on, " cum frigidus aera Vespera temperat," 
" when cool evening tempers the air." The sun, Cicero finely 
calls mundi temperatio, " the temperer of the world." As a 
substantive, "temper" denotes our general character or dispo- 
sition, because compounded of various ingredients. Accord- 
ing to the predominance of one element or another, it is good 
temper, or ill temper, mild temper, or harsh temper. To be 
" temperate" is not to remain in any one season or state, but 
to give everything its proper meed of attention, in deference 
not only to the rules of health, but to the instructions of the 
Preacher, when he tells us that " there is a time for every- 
thing," and that " God hath made everything beautiful (or 
good) in its season." The " intemperate " man, whether in 
things of body or mind, is he who, bestowing his love exclu- 
sively on the spring or the summer, in the morning or the 
evening, refuses to enjoy more than a single season ; and 
thereby neutralizes both the pleasures he selects, and the 
kind ofiices of the remainder of the year. Who so much 
enjoys the calm, sweet friendship of the summer, as he who 
has fought with the asperities of winter ? " Temperature," 
in its primitive sense, denotes that agreeable condition of the 
atmosphere which results from the due admixture of heat 
and cold. 

We use the word " season " in much the same way, and 
for a similar reason, season being a kind of synonym of 
time. 



564 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

" Earthly power doth then show likest God's 
When mercy seasons justice." 

Experiencing the mutations of nature, then, in our own 
daily history, and vividly so as regards the spiritual half of 
our being, the names of the divisions of times and seasons 
become the appropriate metaphors wherein to speak of our 
varied states of heart and mind. There is no other lan- 
guage for the purpose. Nor are any figures referring to 
time so frequent, from the circumstance of the present de- 
partment of the correspondence having been far more 
largely recognized than that which regards the symbolism 
of the year in the collective ; which arises in turn, from 
the fact that men are prone to afiix their attention to 
passing events and contiguous objects, rather than to rise 
to the panoramas of philosophy. Spring, for instance, is 
everywhere identified with hope. Men see that in all their 
qualities the two things are naturally and inseparably ac- 
cordant; and this is probably a reason why descriptions 
of spring are more plentiful than those of any other sea- 
son. For Hope, the only heritage of many men, and 
the light, life, and nepenthe of all, is naturally foremost 
among the emotions, and the most agreeable to think and 
write about ; and it cannot be supposed that the mind ever 
fastens with a pure and animated afiection on natural ob- 
jects and appearances, simply because they are pleasing to 
the eye and ear. That in nature always most interests us 
which bears the closest affinity with the feelings we most 
prize, and those feelings are most prized which yield us our 
highest satisfaction and solace. Eousseau pourtrays the 
symbolic character of the spring in the most beautiful man- 
ner : — " To the appearance of spring the imagination adds 
that of the seasons which are to follow. To the tender buds 
which are perceived by the eye, it adds flowers, fruits. 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 565 

shades, and sometimes the mysteries they conceal. It 
brings into one point of view the things that are to succeed, 
a,nd sees things less as they are than as it wishes them to be. 
In the autumn, on the contrary, we can only contemplate 
the scene before us. If we wish to anticipate the spring, 
our course is stopped by winter, and our frozen imagination 
expires amid snows and fogs." {Emile, lib. 1, tome 1, 448.) 
Spring, like the morning, is used also as the emblem of 
peace and gladness after misfortune, and with perfect pro- 
priety, because the season of returning hope. Shelley gives 
a charming example : — 

Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart 
Fell like bright Spring upon some herbless plain. 
How beautiful, and calm, and free thou wert. 
In thy young wisdom ! 

Pindar also, having first called calamity and bereavement 
by the name of vnpo.(z or " snow storm," — 

X6i>v <JT£ (poiviKSOiaiv avdrjcrsv poSois. 

" But now again, after the wintry darkness of the changing months, 
(this happy household) like the earth, has blossomed with purple 
flowers." — Isth. iii. 36, 37. 

So in the elegant poetry of Ovid, — 

Nee fera tempestas toto tamen horret in anno ; 
Et tibi (crede mihi) tempora veris erunt. 
" Bleak winter does not freeze throughout the year ; and to thee, 
too, believe me, the sweet hours of Spring will yet arrive." — Fasti, 
i. 485-6. 

In the Tristia of the same author, the word verno, literally, 
to be like the spring, is applied to the joyous warbling of the 
birds over their newly-made nests, one of the most sweet and 
inspiring accompaniments of the vernal season : — 

48 



^QQ TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Prataque pubescunt variorum flore colorum ; 
Indocilique loquax guttiire vernat avis. 
" The meadows are decked with flowers of many hues ; and the 
prattling birds carol with their untaught throats." — Lib. iii., El. 
xii. 7, 8. 

Summer and winter accord with prosperity and adversity. 
Hence the famous lines at the opening of Richard the 
Third :— 

" Now is the winter of our discontent 
Made glorious summer by the sun of York." 

-^schylus, in the Prometheus, cites winter with admirable 
effect : — 

KaiTOi Kai Xsyoixr' dSvpoftai 



Oe6(r(TVrov x^^i^aji/a, Kal SiacpOopdv 

liop<pf)s. (642-644.) 

" And yet do I grieve even to speak of this heaven-sent winter, 
and the ruin of my form." 

It is finely introduced, also, in line 1015 of the same play. 
But fairly to quote examples of these two figures, would be 
to illustrate the spontaneity with which they have been used 
by the best poets of all ages. Language finding no terms 
so fit, they become a part of its current coin. There is, 
however, one beautiful fact in connection with the emblem- 
ism of the seasons which should not be passed over. As in 
every part of the year some particular department of nature 
is in its highest glory and perfection, so at each period of 
life some particular intellectual faculty is in the ascendant, 
some sentiment is most persuasive, some passion most im- 
perious. Johnson has well treated of the latter circum- 
stances in a paper on the " Climacterics of the Mind." 
(Rambler, No. 151.) Each season of the year, like each 
hour of the day, suggests also its own particular themes for 
thought and conversation ; so that when living in our true 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 567 

and proper relations with nature, there springs up a delicious 
and rewarding sympathy in our minds, which at once em- 
bellishes the world without, and gladdens and fertilizes the 
little world within. Keenly sensible of the operation of this 
beneficent law, the meditative find it alike easy and agree- 
able to classify their thoughts and ideas under the names 
of the months and seasons. The Italian prose poet of the 
17th century, Partenio Giannettasio, divides his lively and 
versatile book, Anniis Etmditus, into four portions, naming 
them Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. 

Of the particular months of the year. May, as the most 
celebrated for its charms, is also the most frequently used in 
metaphor. Perhaps the most elegant instances of the latter 
are those occurring in the minor poems of Schiller, pieces 
many of them inimitable, except to paraphrase, even in the 
hands of his most successful translator — Bulwer. Thus — 

Deine Seele gleich der Spiegelwelle, 

Silberklar und sonnenhelle, 
Maiet noch den triiben Herbst um dich. 

Literally, 

" Tliy soul, like the mirror-wave, silver-clear and sun-briglit, still 
Mays the dim Autumn round thee." — (Melancholie an Laura.) 

As with the four seasons, and with the months, so with day 
and night. No two days are exactly alike. Somewhere, in 
the look either of the sky or of the earth, there is sure to 
have been a change. Even the nights difier in kind. What 
a contrast between an atmosphere choked with black and 
melancholy vapors, and the transparent sky of a frosty 
winter's night, when the innumerable stars are glittering, 
or the round moon is " walking in her brightness." Take 
but a single portion of day or night, and the minutes them- 
selves are found inconstant. One lovely tint of sunrise or 
of sunset comes but as the herald of another. While we 



568 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

watch the purpling of the great cloud-mountains of the west, 
and the surge of liquid gold above their brows, the sprinkled 
roses of the zenith have shed their leaves and fled. So with 
the successive hues of the brighter mornings of Summer and 
early Autumn. He was no poor observer who gave to their 
heavenly splendors the immortal epithets of xpoxortenXoi; 
and pbdoddxroXoq.'^ Precisely similar, as to their muta- 
bility, are the states or attitudes assumed by us in our inner 
lives. Every one is sensible that there are light and dark- 
ness which are not of the sky ; and that peace and happi- 
ness are in sweet natural agreement with the morning, when 
the light breaks forth, and everything is glad ; sorrow and 
disappointment with the gloom of evening ; and their ex- 
tremest and bitterest degrees with the darkness of deep 
night. Hence, in the languages of all nations, we find such 
similes as the morning of hope, the noon of enjoyment, the 
night of sorrow ; every one of them taking also the briefer 
and pleasant form of metaphor, and thus resting on our in- 
tuitions for translation. What can be more exquisite and 
touching than when poor Electra, in Sophocles, exclaims to 
her long-lost brother, the only friend she has in the world — 

vvv 6' e'xo) ae' wpovipdvri; Si 

(piXroiTav e'x&JI' Tcpoaoipiv. 

" But now I have thee ; and thou hast dawned upon me with most 
dear aspect." — {Electra, 1285-6.) 

In calamity, says the Arabic proverb, there is hope, for the 
end of a dark night is the dawn. 

The life of religion experiences the same vicissitudes. 
Consisting of six principal evening-mornings, its minuter 
history records, nevertheless, an infinity of little ones ; just 



* " SafFron-robed" and " rosy-fingered." 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 569 

as the three-score-and-ten years of the animal life are made 
up of some five-and-twenty thousand miniatures of years. 
Involuntarily and strangely to us, there are perpetual oscil- 
lations between love and indifference towards what is right. 
Without knowing how or why, we find every now and then, 
that we have traveled into the " strange country" of the 
prodigal son.* Scripture, accordingly, is replenished with 
allusions to day and night, morning and evening, in these, 
their particular senses, night and evening being used to de- 
note the sorrow and despondency of the soul ; morning and 
day to express faith, hope, and joy. The context always 
indicates whether the words refer to stages of the spiritual 
development in general, or simply to its often-repeated con- 
ditions. In the Psalms these figures are especially abundant. 
Thus — " At midnight I will rise to give thanks to thee, be- 
cause of thy righteous judgments." Here is shown how 
under the deepest sense of sin and disobedience, a sincere 
and contrite heart will yet remember and be gratefiil for 
God's mercy. To the same purport is Ps. Ixiii. 6, — "When 
I meditate on thee in the night-watches, because thou hast 
been my help, in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice." 
Out of the cold and darkness of such night, as out of winter, 
burst light and beauty. No state of despondency or mourn- 
ing is so deep that in due time it does not give way to hope 
and rejoicing. Our "youth is renewed like the eagle's." 
When his sorrows pass into peace, David exclaims, because 
of this — " I will sing of thy mercy in the morning." And 
elsewhere, that though " weeping may endure for a night, 



* " Moral epochs have their course as well as the seasons. We 
can no more hold them fast than we can hold sun,~moon, and stars. 
Our faults perpetually return upon us, and herein lies the subtlest 
difficulty of self-knowledge." — Goethe, Bichtung und Wahrheit, book 
xiii., vol. 3, p. 123. 
48 «- 



570 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

joy Cometh in 'the morning." And to show again that 
whatever may be our state, the mind should always be di- 
rected towards God, he says of " the righteous man," that 
" in His law doth he meditate both day and night." All 
these passages acquire their highest interest and significance 
from our realizing them within ourselves. It was for this 
end they were designed. Beautiful and practical as they 
are in the letter, and affecting as the recorded utterances of 
an individual, they truly become God's word to us only in 
proportion that we feel that we repeat them for ourselves, 
and not so much with our lips, as in the inmost recesses of 
our being. The history of the ravens bringing food to 
Elijah while in the wilderness, both " in the morning" and 
" in the evening," has the same personal relation to us, and 
is to be interpreted after the same manner. Whenever, 
like the prophet, we are dwelling " by the brook Cherith,"* 
God's benevolent remembrance lets no period pass over 
without giving appropriate supplies of nourishment. All 
that he asks is faith in him, and then he will cheer the 
darkest night. It is a glorious privilege to have the power 
of honoring God by faith. Angels can adore and love, but 
only man, the suffering, self-made exile, surrounded by 
doubts and error, pain and temptation, tempest and dark- 
ness, can honor his God by faith. 

" Day" is used not only in the senses above specified, but 
also as a metonymy for time, periods, and seasons in gene- 
ral, and thence as a metaphor for states and conditions of 
all possible kinds, whether good or evil. "Time," "period," 
and " season," are similarly used as figures for " day." We 
speak of days of rejoicing, a day of trouble, times of success, 



* To dwell "by the brook Cherith" signifies to be in the endu- 
rance of temptations. Though the truths of the Word are then in 
obscurity to man's mind, he is nevertheless supported by them. 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 571 

seasons of hope, the days of one's youth. " Behold, I will 
add unto thy days, fifteen years." (Is. xxxviii. 5'.) It is im- 
portant to note this meaning of the word, because of its fre- 
quent use in Scripture to denote states in general, whatever 
their quality. " Give us this day our daily bread," is in its 
higher sense, a prayer for the spiritual assistance best suited 
to the condition of our soul at the moment of preferring the 
request. 

So varied is the moral significance of Times and Seasons 
that they might yet be contemplated in new relations, and 
with new and agreeable profit. How beautiful, for in- 
stance, is the agreement of the morning and the Spring with 
childhood, in the further respect of its peculiar innocence 
and purity ! It is by reason of this agreement that in 
Scripture, the innocence and purity so vitally essential to 
the life of the Christian, are frequently denoted by or sym- 
bolized in childhood ; as when our Lord placed the little 
child " in the midst," thereby showing that innocence should 
be the centre of thought and deed. For every act of the 
Saviour's, as well as every word, has its spiritual meaning 
and instruction ; and if, with His divine help, we do not 
strive, in every daily duty, to place the little child in the 
midst, each of us for ourselves, in the principles and method 
of our actions, we are not truly attending to His behests. 
Hence, too, His divine warning that unless we become " as 
little children," we can " in no wise enter the kingdom of 
heaven." It is for the same reason that the Lord is imaged 
as " the Lamb." In the unaffected simplicity of all its lit- 
tle ways, in the sharing of its food, for example, with those 
around, the little child is the sweetest emblem of the Chris- 
tian, while the exquisite delicacy of its frame is the outward 
and visible picture of its moral qualities. Hence the deep 
significance of the history of Naaman, who, when he had 
obediently washed himself in the Jordan for his leprosy, 



572 TIMES AND SEASONS. 

" became clean, and his flesh like the flesh of a little child." 
In the future state we shall probably enjoy all the varieties 
of temporal life at the same moment ; the wisdom of age, 
the vigor of manhood, the grace of youth, the innocence of 
infancy. 

Again, morning is pre-eminently the time of beauty. 
Hence the innumerable similes of " beautiful as the morn- 
ing," and "fair as the morning." With its added attributes 
of innocence and purity, it becomes the emblem of female 
youthfulness. In " Festus," accordingly, we have the 
"maiden morn," and the "virgin morn." A "mVgin" is 
literally, " one in her spring," both as to time and to moral 
state. And as the latter is the higher signification of this 
beautiful word, the Bible applies it to both sexes. " These 
are they which are virgins, which follow the Lamb whither- 
soever he goeth." 

Finally, may be noticed the ancient, pleasing, and uni- 
versal fancy that heaven is a land of perpetual spring and 
sunshine. 

" There everlasting Spring abides. 
And never-withering flowers." 

In conformity with this belief, the pictures sought to be 
drawn of the future state of the blessed have in every age 
used spring and daylight for their unvarying landscape. 
But it may be questioned if this be right. Milton perhaps 
is nearer the truth when he makes Eaphael tell Adam that 
in heaven, as on earth, there are changes of times and sea- 
sons, morning and evening : — 

" For we have also our evening and our morn." 

" The face of brightest heaven had changed 

To grateful twilight (for night comes not there 
In darker veil), and roseate dews disposed 
All but the unsleeping eyes of God to rest." 



TIMES AND SEASONS. 573 

He gives the reason also why it should be so : — 

" Por change delectable." 

There can be no doubt that that grand unity of design 
which links together every law and item of the visible uni- 
verse, extends also to the heavenly world ; making it a sub- 
lime prototype in spiritual scenery and phenomena, of what 
here below is witnessed in material shape. Time reigns in the 
world of matter; state, in the world of spirit, each answering 
to the other. When, therefore, we enter the eternal coun- 
try, the golden city of the great King, though we shall have 
parted from the sweet presence of months and seasons as we 
now know them, it will be to find that they were only the 
weak, shadowy representatives of spiritual states infinitely 
more glorious and inspiring. The times and seasons which 
here owe their being to the sun of nature, will then be spi- 
ritually reproduced by the Sun of Kighteousness, Avho is its 
life and light ; save that what here is winter will be dis- 
armed of all its cold and bitterness ; and what is night, of 
all its dismalness and terrors. It is in true nights, when the 
skies put forth their radiant splendors, that even in this 
present life we see most of God. 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Actinia 467, 482 

Action the spring of Happiness 311 

Adansonia 134, 139 

Age, signification of the word 314 

not a matter of birthdays... .254, 257 

death from old 123 

Ages, criteria of. 134 

Air, office of the 77 

Algfe, duration of life in 151 

— ^ Indian and Antarctic 493 

Amaranths 413 

Amusement, rationale of. 303, 323 

Analogy, philosophy, office and 

value of. 425 

distinction between Cor- 
respondence and 426 

Analogies between minerals and 

flowers 432, 434, 463 

of plants 475, 480 

of animals 480, 485 

between plants and ani- 
mals .154, 486-496 

of the seasons 553 

Anima and animus, signification of 235 

Anima mundi 32 

Animal signifies "breather" 77 

"Animal soul" 230 

"Animal functions" 46 

Animals and plants, comparative 

structure of. 147 

duration of life in 152 

food of 63 

physical powers of the lower 459 

happiness of the lower 403 

Animalcules 23, 462, 4S0 

Annual plants, value to man of 138 

Antediluvians, longevity of the 167 

Antetypes of nature, spiritual 177, 

189, 420 

Apparitions 221 

Appetite, duty to have a good one 70 

Apples, why sacred to A^enus 444 

Aristienetus, quoted 443, 504 

Art, its px-imary source 180 

Natural Theology of 181 

principles of. 109, 508 

Asphyxia 121 

Atmosphere, functions of the 77 

evils of an impure 94 

a solution 94 



PAGE 

Autumn, emblematic character of..... 553 

Autumnal foliage and sunset 457 

Beauty, motion needful to 106 

value of personal 289 

Beetles 461 

Bible, best evidence of truth of the... 188 

Bichat, quoted .43, 121 

Birds, longevity of. 158 

singing of. 355, 445 

nuptial plumage of. 351, 3.55 

instincts of. 517 

Blennius, pholis 483 

Blood, the 60, 87, 101, 118 

specific differences begin in the 464 

Bones, structure and growth of.. ...170-173 

Books and reading 287 

criteria of good ones 290 

friendship of. 296 

Bosom, the female, images in nature of 440 

Botany, pleasures and rewards of. 271 

Brain, the 121 

Breath, the sign and symbol of 

life 85, 116 

of the dying, superstitions 



respecting 117 

Browne, Dr. Henry, quoted 121 

Sir Thomas, quoted 365, 414 

Brutes, their want of reason 522 

intelligence of 530 

supposed immorality of. 401 

Buffon, quoted 168 

Burial-grounds, intramural 98 

popular errors regarding 409 

Butterfl}', emblem of the Resurrec- 
tion 351 

life of the..... 143 



Calendar of Nature 546 

Cardan, Jerome, quoted 413 

Carlyle, quoted 219, 265 

Carnivora, vegetable 63, 438 

Carpenter, quoted 55 

Carus, quoted 14, 32, 511 

Cellular plants 479 

Cemeteries 98 

Cerealia 48 

Cereus, night-flowering 43S 

Chain of Nature 447 

Change the universal law 201 

Cheerfulness, secret of. 316 

Chemistry, ultimatum of 30 

575 



676 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Cholera 119 

Ciliary motion 19 

Classical education 274 

Classification of plants and animals, 

ti-ue idea of 494 

Clevedon, view from 421 

Clouds, the 107 

Coal plants 206 

Coleridge, quoted 192, 441 

Common things, value of 266, 275 

Conifers 138 

Conversation, Art of. 319 

Corals 148 

Correlation of Foixes 55 

Correspondence, or analogy between 

the spiritual and material .175, 194 

Cousin, Victor, quoted 454 

Cryptogamia, enormous fertility of.... 22 

Crystals 131 

Cupid and Psyche, fable of. 346 

Curiosity the appetite of the mind.... 284 

Dead, sorrow for the 391 

Death, causes of Physical 115-121 

rationale of Ill, 241 

mistaken ideas respecting .399 

fear of. 396 

real nature and meaning of..... 386 

spuitual 333 

is rejuvenescence 365 

of friends, use of. 392 

Scriptural senses of the word.. 337 

ti'ue and false emblems of. 412 

the aliment of life 345 

Degrees, discrete and continuous 454 

Delesseria sanguinea 51, 151 

Desmidiese 463, 467 

Desmodium gj'rans 19 

Dionsea muscipula 18, 63, 437 

Diseases, origin of. 369 

• representative character of. .. 380 

D'lsraeli, quoted 191, 362 

Dreams 414 

Drosera -63, 437, 469 

Duration of life 119 

in animals 152 

in plants 132 

Eating, pleasui'es of. 68-71 

Echo 84 

Education, true and false 272, 285, 326 

Eggs, tenacity of life in 21 

Ehrenbxu-g, quoted 148, 468 

Electricity 54 

Elements of matter, primitive 30, 126 

Elephant 157, 165 

Emblems of death, true and false 412 

Ennui 317 

Epicurism .70, 317 

Evening primrose 438 

Exogens and Endogene, differences 

between 489 

Eye and the ear, the 82 

Eyes of brutes and man 524 

Eye, the epitome of the body 504 

Faith and works 300 

Fecundity, comparative 165 

Feeding and procreation, analogies of 75 
Feelings, truths of the 217 



PAGE 

Ferns 361 

Fichte, quoted 258, 264, 345 

Fishes, lease of life in 159 

Flourens, quoted 168, 169 

Flowers, structure of. 475 

night-blooming 363 



Food, particulars respecting 57 

Form, law of 233 

true idea of. 495 

Frost-flowers 432 

Functions of organized beings 465 

Fungi. 16, 140, 167, 490, 492 

Phosphorescent..... 442 

Generalization 428 

Genius, chai-acteristics of. 312, 429, 542 

Geographical associations of plants 

and animals 488 

Geology, facts in 12, 357, 485 

the poem of. 205, 357 



Gestation, periods of 164 

Ghost, meaning of the word 231 

Ghost-belief. 217, 243 

God, personality of. 31 

distinct from natiu-e .32, 498 

traeideaof 36, 301, 400 

unity of. 498 

Good, Dr. Mason, quoted 218, 510 

Gosse, quoted 22, 441, 468, 483 

Guyot, Arnold, quoted 23 

Happiness, secret of. 314, 389 

Harvey, Dr., quoted 148 

Head, the, the epitome of man 504 

Health 366 

Heart and Lungs, the 86 

Heat, animal 93 

relation of to life 53 

Heaven, true idea of 182, 230 

Heliotrope 49 

Herder, quoted 346 

Hitchcock, quoted 28 

Home, instinct of. 527 

Homology 473 

in plants 475 

Hope 271 

the "breath of Life" 271 

Humboldt, quoted 53, 104 

Hunger, considerations upon 61 

the source of moral order.... 68 

significance of in Scripture.. 281 
and love 75 



Hybrids, fewness of real ones 463 

why infertile 190 



Ice-plant . 

Imagination, office and rewards of 

the 185, 270, 284, 415 

Immortality, rationale of. 399 

Inactivity, destructive results of. 317 

Inorganic nature, life of. 23, 105 

Insanity 367 

Insects, their voracity 66 

their sizes 122 

their term of life 161 

their metamorphoses 351 



Inspiration, true idea of. 536 

Instinct and reason, considerations 

upon 509 

four leading species of. 515 



IINDEX. 



577 



Instinct in plants 51S 

in man 528 

Intellect contingent upon external 

natui-e 499 

Language, philosophy of. 228, 499 

figurative 14, 226 

a form of poetry 225 

Latent life 20 

Laws of Nature 28. 374 

Laycock, Dr., quoted 355, 511 

Leaf, the, the type of the plant 476 

Leases of life, the various 128 

Life, derived from God 26 

varieties of. 38 

three degrees of in man 505 

definitions of. 43-44 

etymology nf the word 101 

names applied to 43 

consists in action and reaction of 

complementaries 34 

Life of inorganic nature 24, 40 

depends on food 57 

is motion 100 

an everlasting spiral 235 

blessedness and privileges of. 250 

is love 259 

should be made the most of. 388 

is poetry 269 

Scripture senses of the woi-d 310 

uncreate 26 

general idea of. 11-14 

Light, relation of to life 49-53 

Linaria vulgaris 478 

Love 527 

of Nature 264 

of offspring, instinct of. 518 

Lucernaria auricula.. 468 

Man the epitome of nature 466, 497 

characteristics of. 207 

Mantis religiosa 162 

Marriage, conducive to longevity 173 

the universal beginning.. .36, 89 

Martineau, quoted 34, 253 

Materialists and Spiritualists 192 

Matter and Substance 179 

Memory, permanence of. 416 

Menander, quoted 260 

Microcosm, man a 195, 500 

Mildew, origin, &c. of. 22, 480 

Mind in advanced life 256 

" Ministry of the Beautiful" 306 

Miracles 372-380 

Mistletoe 165 

Molecular death 58 

Monkeys 4S8 

Mortality and Immortality 386 

Mosses 436 

Motion the universal sign of life. ..100-108 

Music 82 

and light, analogy of. 384 

Mystery 211 

" Mysticism" 192 

Mythology 365 

Natural history, uses and rewards of.. 271 

Nature, true idea of. 177 

unity of. 471 

love of. 264 

49 



Ni-W-iTl '•• 



PAGE 

Natme, soothing influence of. 277 

Nervous fluid 120 

Nettle 442 

Nuptial season. Beauties attendant 

upon the 355 

Odyle 48 

Oersted, quoted 106 

Orange-blossom, why worn by brides. 444 

Oi-chidese 96, 442, 487 

Ornithogalum unibellatum 434 

Oscillatoria 19 

Ovid, quoted 109 

Oxalidese 18 

Palingenesis 100 

Palm-trees Vi7 

" Panthea," Hunt's, quoted 13 

Pantheism 31 

Papilionacese 441 

Parasitic plants 63 

Parrots 488 

" Perfection," meaning of, as spoken 

of natural forms 461 

Petrarch, quoted 296, 367 

Philo JudEeus, quoted 182, 336 

Philosophy, true principles of. 471 

Physics, physiology, and psychology.. 208 

Plants, food of. ."... 63 

respiration of. 95 

sleep of 438 

sexuality of. 439 

instinct of. 518 

lactation in 76, 439 

leases of life in 132 

Plaj', I'ationale of 322 

Plurality of Worlds 12 

Pneuma, signification of. 237 

Poetry, true idea, oflice and rewards 

of 222, 267, 387 

Polytheism 540 

Pomegranate 443 

Prefigurations of nature 4-31 

in minerals 432 

in plants 4-36 

in animals 445 

Procreation the great end of nature.. 141 

dignity and sanctity of... 3.54 

Promotion, law of, in material nature 466 

in human body 503 

Proof pertains only to inferior truths 187 

Propagation, instinct of. 517 

Proteus, fable of. 155 

Protococcus 45 

Psyche, signification of. 236 

Puberty, relation of, to length of 

life 145, 164 

Radcliffe, Dr., quoted 25 

Ray, quoted 17 

Reading, objects and delights of 296 

Reason, true idea of. 379 

Rejuvenescence, law of. 344 

in human body 352 

in human mind 361 

in Institutions 363 

in animals 347 

of the earth 357 

Religion, ti-ue idea of. 298, 423, 508 

and philanthropy 73 



ylvju ^ vvv{ju^ir|!t<^2!!*l'C<«v 



/J~ 



578 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Reproduction the great aim of nature 142 

Reptiles, longevity of. 160 

Respiration, apparatus and office of. .85-93 

Resurrection, true idea of the 339, 406 

Rlcherand, quoted 43 

Richter, quoted 272 

Rosacese 360 

Rousseau, quoted 66, 263 

Ruskin, quoted 125,276, 424 

Sanitary Reforms 95 

Schiller, quoted 262 

Sohleiden, quoted , 21,149, 442 

Seasons, analogies of the 554 

Sects, religious, only two really dis- 
tinct ones 302 

Seeds, structure of. 76, 439 

vitality of. 21 

Self-defense, instinct of 515 

Self-preservation, instinct of. 515 

Senses, office of the 1S5 

sympathy between the 90 

Sensitive-plant 19, 451 

Sensuous life, office and importance of 

the 507 

Sexual principle, universality of the.. 8S 

Shakspere, Christianity of. .SOS 

Shells, forms of. 2.35 

Skeletons, vegetable 437 

Sleep .349 

of plants 438 

Snow-crystals 434 

Soul, the, a spiritual body 213, 245 

is the man 239, 409 

true idea of the 208 

etymology of the word 229 

Sound and color, analogy between.... 384 

Spatangus 473 

Species, constancy of, depends on 

spiritual nature 463 

importance of attention to 454 

Spencer, Herbert, quoted 13, 44 

Spii'al, in natiu-e 234 

Spirit, signification of. 232 

Spiritual degree of life 207 

world, the 176, 419 

Sponges 16 

Spring, symbolism of. 554, 564 

begins in autumn 350 

Substance and matter 179 

Sunday, true idea of its observance... 300 



PAGE 

Swan, singing of the 413 

Swedenborg, quoted 89, 454 

Teeth, the 464 

Temperance and moral purity 76 

Tennyson, quoted 117 

Theocritus quoted 444 

Theology a progressive science 342 

Time, origin of idea of. 546 

makes no one old necessarily.... 256 

Toads in stones 123 

Tortoises 160 

Tranquility 276 

Trees, structure of. 135, 147 

longevity of. 133 

analogy of, with the world.139, 359 

analogy of man with 501 

in cemeteries 98 

Tritouia arborescens 491 

Tropics, vegetation of the 53 

Truths, apparent and gemiine 33 

popular indifference to 213 

Tschudi, quoted 50 

Ulrici, quoted 308 

Unitv of Nature 470-497 

Use of law 39. 175, 208 

Yallisneria 103 

"Varieties" 461 

Vegetarianism 67 

Vegetative functions 46, 465 

Vertebral Archetype 473 

in plants 477 

A'irey, quoted ., 511 

Virgil, quoted 80, 125 

Virgin Mary, the, why worshiped 254 

"Vital force" 2T 

tissue 47 

stimuli, the 48 

Vitality of seeds 21 

Want, the source of Happiness 314 

Wellingtonia gigantea 138 

Wilkinson, .1. .J. Garth, quoted 56 

Wind, the 77-80 

Women's letters 268 

AVork, true idea and uses of 328 

Worlds, plurality of 12 

Young, number of, at a birth 165 

Youth and age, true idea of 249 

a condition to which wu attain 258 

Zephyrs, literally the " life-bringers" 77 
Zoophytes 16, 453, ICQ 



FROM THE PRESS OF J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 



Elements of Art Criticism. Coinprlsing a treatise on tlie Principles 

of Man's Nature as addressed by Art. Together with a historic survey of the methods 
of Art Execution in the departments of Drawing, Sculpture, Architecture, Painting, 
Landscape Gardening, and the Decorative Arts. Designed as a Text Book for Schools 
and Colleges, and as a Hand Book for Amateurs and Artists. By G, W. Samsox, D.D., 
President of Columbia College, Washington, D. C. (In press.) 

The J>ivine Attributes, including also tJi,e Nature of the Divine 

Trinity and a Treatise on the Divine Love and Divine Wisdonl. From the Apocalypse 
Explained of Emanuel Svvedenborg. (In press.) 

Addison's Complete Works. Enitn'acing nwrnerows pieces noto fi/rst 

collected, and Macaulay's Essay on the Life and "Writings of Addison. Edited, with 
Notes, by Professor Greene. With a Portrait on steel. Complete in 6 vols., 12mo. 
Cloth, S9.00 ; sheep, library style, $10.50 ; half calf, neat, $16.50 ; half calf, gilt, 
extra, $18.00. 

SoswelVs I/ife of JbJinson, First Comiilete American Edition. 

With Numerous Additions by Jno. Wilson Crokee, M.P., and Notes by various hands. 
4 vols., 12mo. Cloth, S6.00; sheep, library style, $7.00; half calf, neat, $11.00 ; .half 
calf, gUt, extra, $12.00. 

Cliamhers's Sooh of Days. The JBook of Days: A Miscellany of 

Popular Antiquities in connection with the Calendar, including Anecdote, Biography, 
and History, Curiosities of Literature, and Oddities of Human Life and Character. 
Edited under the supervision of Robert Ch.^mbers, LL. D. Complete in two volumes, 
royal 8vo. Cloth, $9.00 ; sheep, $10.00 ; half Turkey, $11.00. 

Chanibers's Encyclopcedia, A Dictionary of Vniversal Enowledge 

for the People, on the basis of the latest edition of the German Conversations-Lexicon. 
Illustrated with Maps and numerous Wood Engravings. Published in eight parts, 
price, 25 cents each. The whole to be comprised in nine volumes, royal octavo. 
Price, per volume, cloth, $^1.50; sheep, $5.00 ; half Turke.y, $5.50. 

GoldstnitJi's Com2ilete Works, Etnbraeing numerous pieces noiv first 

collected, with copious Notes by J.\mes Prior. With four Vignettes engraved on steel. 
4 vols., 12mo. Cloth, $6.00 ; do., sheep, library style, $7.00 ; do., half calf, neat, $11.00 ; 
do., half calf, gilt, extra, $12.00. 

lAppincott's Fronouncinff Gazetteer of the World ; Or, Oeographical 

Dictionary. Comprising over 2300 pages ; giving a description of nearly one hundred 
thousand places, with the Correct Pronunciation of their Names. Revised Edition, 
with an Appendix, containing nearly 10,000 New Notices, and the most recent Statis- 
tical Information, being about 30,000 more Geographical Notices than are found in any 
other Gazetteer of the world. Edited by J. Thomas, M.D., and T. Baldwin, assisted by 
several other gentlemen. 1 vol., royal 8vo. 1866. Library binding, $10.00; half 
Turkey antiaue, $12.00; 2 vols., library style, $12,00; do., half antique, $15.00. 

Footfalls on tlie JBoundaiy of Another World. With Narrative Illus- 

trations by Robert Dale Owen, formerly Member of Congress, and American Minister 
to Naples. 12mo., cloth, $1.75. 



FROM THE PEBSS OF J. B. LIPPINOOTT & CO. 



lAfe of Emanuel Swedenborg. Together with a JSrief Synopsis of 

his Writings, both Philosophical and Theological. By Wiluam White. With an In- 
troduction by B. F. Bahrett. Pirst American Edition. 12mo. Price $1.50. 

The Bistory of Jls-ury, frmn the JSarliest Feriod to the Present 

Time ; together with a Brief Statement of General Principles concerning the Conflict 
of Laws in different States and Countries, and an examination into the Policy of Laws 
on Usury, and their Effect upon Commerce. By J. B. C. Murray. 1 vol., 8vo. 

A. Neiv Dictionary of Quotations, from the Greek, Ziatin, and 

Modern Languages, translated into English, and occasionally accompanied with Illus- 
trations, Historical, Poetical, and Anecdotical. With an extensive Index, referring to 
everj- important word. Demi 8vo, cloth, gilt, $2.00 ; do., half vellum, gilt top, $2.25 ; 
Turkey antique, gilt edges, S5.00. 

JHosaics of Iiife. A. Collection of Iiiterary Gems Illustrative of the 

Various Epochs of Human Life, — viz: Betrothal, Wedded Life, Babyhood, Youth, 
Single Life, Old Age. By Mrs. Elizabeth A. Thurston. i2mo, cloth, gilt top, $2.00. 

Hours A/inong the Gospels; Or, Wayside Truths from the lAfe of 

our Lord. By Rev. N. C. Burt, D.D. 1 vol., 12mo. $1.50. 
The World before the Deluge. Translated frmn the fourth French 

Edition by Louis Figder. 1 vol., 8vo. $7.50. 

Sjitto's JBiblical Cyclopedia, New Edition, A. Cyclopedia of JBibli- 

cal Literature. Originally edited by John Kitto, D.D., F.S.A. Third edition, greatly 
enlarged and improved. Edited by Wm. Lindsay Alexander, D.D., F.S.A., etc. In 3 
volumes royal 8vo, S7.00 per volume. Elegantly printed, and beautifully illustrated 
with Maps and Engravings. Published in connection with Messrs. A. & C. Black of 
Edinburg. 

Wetliods of Instruction; Or, that part of the JPhilosophy of Educa- 
tion which treats of the Nature of the Several Branches of Knowledge and the 
Methods of teaching them. By James Pyle Wickersham, A.M., Principal of the 
Pennsylvania State Normal School, at Millersville. 12mo, $1.75. 

Wichershani's Sclwol Economy. A Treatise on the Frepa/ration, 

Organization, Employments, Government, and Authorities of Schools. By James Ptlb 
Wickersham, A.M., Principal of the Pennsylvania State Normal School, Millersville, 
Pa. 1 vol., 12mo. $1.25. 
A Guide to Experiments in Philosophy, Erich's Physical Technics ; 

Or, Practical Instructions for making experiments in Physics and the construction of 
Physical Apparatus with the most limited means. By Dr. I. Frick, Director of the 
High School at Freiburg, and Professor of Physics in the Lyceum. Translated by Dr. 
John D. Easter, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry in the University 
of Georgia. 1 vol., 8vo. Amply illustrated. $3.00. 

Great ^Truths by Great AutJiors, A Dictionary of Aids to Meflection, 

Quotations of Maxims, Counsels, Cautions, Aphorisms, Proverbs, &c., &c., from Writers 
of all Ages and both Hemispheres. 1 vol. demi 8vo. Cloth, $2.25; cloth, gilt edge, 
$2.50 ; ultramarine cloth, gilt sides and edges, $2.75 ; half Turkey antique, fancy, $3.50; 
half calf antique, gilt, $1.00 ; full Turkey antique, $5.00. 



^y 



/ 



Ill 



^v- 



:m^- 



